


Single Male Ordered

by Odamaki



Category: Gundam Wing
Genre: Arranged Marriage, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, M/M, Mail Order Brides, Marriage of Convenience, Mission Fic, Strangers to Lovers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-20
Updated: 2019-07-18
Packaged: 2019-10-29 02:38:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 31,599
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17799557
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Odamaki/pseuds/Odamaki
Summary: Wufei is suffocated by the demands of his status, dragging his heels towards a wedding neither he nor Meilan want. Heero is at a loss, relocated to a new city but uninterested in making a fresh start. When a peculiar opportunity to fake an identity as a mail-order bride presents itself, Wufei takes a rash leap of faith - Heero is taken aback to find himself the guaranteur of a stranger who has no interest in being the language tutor Heero thought he'd commissioned. Wufei meanwhile has ten days in which to convince Heero to marry him before he's deported back to a colony that's outraged by his defection, but Heero's personality doesn't make his odds seem good, and a burgeoning political disaster might make thier problems seem very minor indeed.AU inspired by a prompt from Noirangetrois on Tumblr. :)





	1. The Narrow Horizon

His entire world is eighteen kilometres long and just three kilometres wide. Enough, supposedly, to last a hundred lifetimes. It’s bigger at least than the main hall of the Long clan, and bigger than their compound. Wufei pushes through the crowds, struggling for air, but out here is still better than in there.

The people on the street ignore his anger. They are inured to living cheek by jowl on the colony, and besides, some of them recognise him. It's a fact that always frustrates Wufei. He wears the same standardised clothing as many men of the city, albeit less mended, and there can scarcely be a more homogenised settlement in space, but they know him even when he’s trying his hardest not to be known.

There’s just something about him.

He elbows out of the station area up onto the great bridge that spans a full two kilometres from one side to the other, each foot anchored in a station forecourt. The bridge is busy as well, but the pedestrians divide into streams by those who cross with purpose and those who have stopped to idle, or sell.

Wufei joins the latter group, seeking to quiet his mood in the hubbub of the bridge. The normalcy of it; radishes for sale, two coins for a slice; news both fresh and stale; the snap and pop of crickets frying in oil, the hawker calling as she tosses them back and forth in the pan with a scrape of her ladle, liberal with the chilli. He hasn’t any money, though. He stormed out of the compound without any. The hawker is perhaps only a few years older than him, and she casts him an eye, shaking a cone already stuffed with the delicacy towards him. He turns away, his stomach still boiling with acid from his argument with Master Long. Undisturbed, the hawker switches to the next man on the bridge.

She has plenty to chose from. One thing amongst many that the colony lacks is women.

Left to his own opinion, the deficit would be of no concern whatsoever to him, but the clan has the pressing need to secure an heir. Too bad for them, things have gone surly with his wedding arrangements. The fact that Meilan has spurned him is a little galling to his pride, but honestly a relief in all other respects. She’s not a bad woman, and in fact, the only one suitable according to the various traditions of the clan, but she suffers the one real detriment to making a real match in Wufei’s eyes - she’s not a man.

This stumbling block is an irrelevance to the Masters, and Wufei had brought himself to a state of resignation over the fact. Then abruptly, Meilan had thrown her status into the ring as the head woman of her own branch of the clan, and has the whole process stymied. Wufei wishes her luck with it, and he will not, whatever threat Master Long harangues him with, try and convince her otherwise. If forced to admit it, he can't blame her for feeling offended. 

Wufei stops in the middle of the bridge and looks down into the city below. A constant stream of electric cars pours along the highway below, noiseless save for the purr of the tyres, but the edges of the road are jangling with bicycles, rattling with handcarts, billowing with the shouts and business of dozens of small people, eking a livelihood in the gutters of this engineering masterpiece.

‘What did it all achieve?’ Wufei wonders, ‘Other than to re-establish our poverty in space.’

All this pressure to keep the status quo, the pride of the Long clan. For what? So that the second daughter of a lesser family can cook food on the roadside. She must be sterile or the family must be desperate, Wufei thinks, for her have been sent out to work like that. He glances back. Or maybe she’s like him and Meilan, and the traditional system just doesn't satisfy. This life is unfair on everyone, but not equally so.

Wufei idles a little further towards the other side of the bridge, away from the oily smell of the little stand, into the chirring of another saleswoman. This one is old, powdered, neatly dressed. She has a pull-cart, into which she dips her hand and proffers what he first mistakes for charms, and then recognises as widgets - flimsy electronic devices, containing little more than an app or a single webpage. It piques his interest, because widgets aren’t manufactured in the colony. They can't be. Widgets are one of those rare things from the outside, ostensibly allowed, but they permeate the colony in a trickle not a flow. They usually come from other colonies in the L5 cluster, but sometimes further away. L2 has sent various missionary statements, which while laughable, often contain books as well. Passing, Wufei takes one.

“A wife for you?” the woman asks.

Startled at her perception, Wufei turns. “No.”

“Then this is a very great opportunity.” She beams, pressing the widget further into his hands. “How fortunate! We offer a wide range of new brides from a truly excellent catalogue - all young, all waiting for your word to join our family. You won’t find better.”

Wufei frowns, puzzled. He turns the widget over and initiates the screen, where it flickers into life. A hazy pink fills the image, across which a number of pretty girls' faces appear and vanish before fading out to a series of options.

“I can show you. What do you like? See, we have a girl to suit any taste. Let me see…”

“No…” Wufei begins, and then something strikes him about the girls. They’re all asian, but they have faces of a type he’s never seen in person. Not in the features, but something in the spirit. He presses his thumb on a photo and a profile flicks up, to the old woman’s delight, but he’s more interested in the logistics than the girl. He scrolls past her details and alights on the economics of the marriage arrangement service. It’s there he spots the true irregularity.

“Import tax?”

“Yes; just a small fee for clearing through customs and suchlike. These brides come a long way to find a good husband, and cannot bring much but guaranteed good health.”

“A long way from where?” Wufei asks, suspicious.

“It’s all official,” the old lady says, looking hurt. “Signed off because of the great shortage of wives for the colony. It’s a good bargain made with China Main.”

“No one is allowed to emigrate here. No one is allowed to leave,” Wufei says. It’s the cardinal rule, in fact. It shouldn’t need saying. The old woman shakes her hand at him, terribly earnest.

“No, no, new rules. We have new permissions for bringing in new brides.”

“Visas?”

“That’s right, exactly. All perfectly legal.” She jabs at the widget and pulls up the page of small print. Wufei reads it, and feels the bridge sway beneath his feet.

Visas. L5 are granting visas through the China Main consulate. It’s as if the woman is telling him that carp can fly.

“I’ll take this,” Wufei decides on the spur of the moment, pushing the widget into his jacket. The old woman crinkles into another big powdery smile and bows, thanking him again and once more. Wufei steers away from her, heart beating hard.

Visas.

Visas into L5 from China Main, Wufei realises, but really, potentially, from anywhere. The origin doesn’t matter, it’s in. He stops, stock still on the cusp of the bridge and grasps the rail of it in one blind hand.

What are the chances? Slim? Good? China Main exiled the Long clan but the colony is more than that now. It’s a shamble of clans, and without his noticing, become willing to pay good money for the women dirt-bound farmers won’t have. And China Main have let the door slip open a crack.

What are the chances they really care about the exile still? What are the chances that they know him? He has two names; his father's name and the Long name, adopted after he was taken in by the Masters following his parents' deaths.

One clerk in a desk in a consulate with a stamp, that’s all it takes. Bang, and the space roads are open to you. 

What are the chances that it’s not just an in? It’s a widget - Master Long won’t have eyes on its system. It’s not one of his propaganda toys.

Standing on the bridge, Wufei looks down the length of the colony. Conditions on Earth are dangerous, he’s heard. Poverty worse than this, disease worse than this. There must be if China Main need to offload it’s tired women up here. They might be refugees, perhaps of strife between peoples, earthquake, eruption, flood, or storm. Disasters like that don’t happen up here, where we are one, and eighteen kilometres is supposed to be enough to give the illusion of a horizon.

That’s what it’s called, on the information point that's flaking paint under his hand. A view along the inside of a treadmill, and they’ve had the arrogance to call it a horizon, though none of them have ever seen one to compare.

What if the brides ever wanted to go back? 

Earth is greedy. Everyone knows that. Earth pushes and takes and owns, whereas the colony is a place where all work and live in harmony of deed and thought and, in theory, share. China Main tossed them out, but not without tagging them, like cattle, so that the universe would know where they were pushed from. Push, and own.

“Because we’re Exiles of China Main,” Wufei thinks, knowing what every L5 child knows, “and legally she still owns us.”

He presses his fingers into the widget, and casts a fervent prayer that he can fool her into claiming him back.


	2. Severance

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Heero makes half-hearted efforts to settle down in life.

“A hundred thousand bucks,” Duo repeats, smearing his hands over his face in anguish. “One hundred thousand big fat smackeroos and you sit there and say ‘I don’t really care about the money, I’ll probably just get rid of it’.”

It’s a passable impression of him, but Heero scowls. “It was severance. I’m not thrilled about it.”

“So they told you to fuck off, hell, I wish someone would pay me to fuck off. Let’s swap, I’ll take the icky, icky money, and you can turn up to annoy me whenever you like. Kidding aside, why don’t you do something with it? Y’know, spite em. Move out of the boonies.”

“It’s a city,” Heero tells him, turning to observe the foggy skyline from the window. 

“A city,” Duo sneers, “Chengshi. No-one’s even heard of it- you might as well be dead. Did you have any luck finding work?”

“Kind of.” Heero shrugs. He takes a swallow from the glass in his hand and feels it burn down his throat. The clock judges that it’s not quite 4pm. “I’ve temporarily signed with an agency. They have contracts for the diplomatic venues, so I should get something from it. Enough, until I can arrange something else.” 

“Just come to the yard,” Duo says, not for the first time. “I’ll send a ship. You can stay with me, build junk. Come on… you can’t seriously want to be out there.” 

Truth is, Heero’s not keen to be anywhere these days. He’d left the military with a sour taste in his mouth, lured to Earth by the promise of a fresh start and a chance to build a better world. A redemption. He’d set himself hard along the path of the law, only three years later he’s achieved nothing but to self-destruct again. 

“I’m fine where I am,” he tells Duo. It’s not entirely a lie. It’s been a long time since he threw himself into a place where he had no ties. Of all the places on Earth he could have gone, Chengshi would not have been his first choice, but a tip-off had suggested good work burgeoning here in the security services.

And it was a long way from Europe. 

Duo is naturally skeptical. “Oh yeah? Met anyone? Made any pals?”

“Jealous?” 

“Bullshit. You even leave the house?” 

“Yes.” He goes to the store, at least. “But no, I haven’t made any solid connections yet…Give me time, there’s a language barrier.” 

“Gotta get over that,” Duo advises. He pauses for a moment, shifting around on the other end of the line and then says, “Heard from Relena the other day. She uh… says hello. Hopes you’re looking after yourself.”

“Did she.” 

“Said she was sorry about… you know.” 

“Letting them fire me?” 

“Yeah,” Duo agrees, uncomfortably. “I mean…Anyway…”

Heero empties the glass and slowly pours another into the silence. He knows. Duo’s the closest thing to a brother he’s ever had, and so he knows by Duo’s silence that he agrees with Relena. For that matter, so does Heero. The bottom line is, he fucked up, and it was one time too many. 

“How about I come by,” Duo says, eventually. “In a month or so? You can give me the grand tour of your po-dunk city.” 

“Sure.” 

“Hey,” Duo adds, brightening. “I know how you could get rid of your cash and tick another box - you could hire a cute tutor. Learn the lingo.”

“I could,” Heero agrees. 

“Do that,” Duo tells him, “And… go easy, Heero.” 

“You don’t have to worry,” Heero replies, toying with the bottle cap. “I told you. I’m fine. I’m managing.”

“Managing,” Duo echoes, sounding like he’s about to say something, but then call disintegrates into a muddle of leave-taking, and ends. Heero uncaps the bottle again. 

Just a splash more. It’s a Friday, after all, and seeing as how he’s not in the mood to go out. He kicks back in his chair, feet up facing the fog, and idles around a novel, not really taking much of it in. He doesn’t really want to read. He doesn’t really want to think, either. Just relax. 

He has a textbook somewhere, that goes through the basics of Mandarin such as he already knows and some of the foundations of New Asiatic, which is supposed to straddle the difference between Mandarin, Japanese, Korean and Thai in the way Esperanto was once punted to the masses. He’s not made terrific headway with either. 

Maybe Duo’s right. 

He’s not much of an academic, but he can grind along and learn just fine. And he likes a challenge. And being in charge. 

“A tutor,” Heero mutters, considering. Where the hell did you find a tutor in Changshi? He’s had a hard enough time moving in. 

Putting the glass down, Heero rises, feeling inexplicably weary. It makes him sluggish as he gropes for his keys and then takes the three-floor trudge down to the ground floor where the landlord lives. The old man is partially deaf, but he manages conversations by assuming that Heero is partially deaf too, and possibly also a congenital idiot. He raises a hand in recognition as Heero approaches the desk in the lobby. 

Heero takes a couple of run ups through the sentence, at several volumes. The door to the landlord’s flat as usual is open, with the TV on and the volume blaring. Presumably so the old guy doesn’t feel left out. 

He gets the gist of what Heero wants, and hums and haws and searches around the desk for a long time. But he doesn’t find what he’s seeking. He shouts through into the back room. The TV volume goes down, the conversation rises, back and forth for so long Heero starts to feel like this isn’t worth the effort, and then the landlord’s son shuffles out, scratching his belly, frowning and questioning. The landlord shrugs and turns back to Heero. “Not school?” 

Heero pictures a sweaty classroom, full of people stumbling over the basics, the embarrassment, and signals a fervent ‘no’. 

“One to one. Price doesn’t matter.” 

The landlord relays this to the son who scrubs at his chin thoughtfully for a moment before tugging a scrap of paper towards him and scratching out a URL. “This?” Heero asks. 

Affirmatives from both men. 

Heero looks over the dancing letters on the page and nods. “Alright then.” 

The climb back upstairs is thirsty work, and he treats himself to another slug of amber in the glass before transliterating the son’s chicken-scratch writing into his laptop, and up it pings in a wash of white and pale pink. 

The website is all in densely typed Chinese, but there’s a chunk in New Asiatic on the splash screen, and the layout is wonderfully simple. Plug in your details, spin the dial and off you go on a whirlwind of matches with potential tutors. Heero nurses the glass in his lap and scrolls through a long list of options, translating loosely to get the gist of who he’s looking at. 

Women, mostly. He grunts, scrolls, grunts again. He tries to imagine meeting them. These women, made inhuman by bad photography, and the more he looks the more he feels like such a meeting would be intolerable. He flicks back up to the top and clicks onto the next page. And the next, and the next, and then somehow he's just clicking and he's hit the end, where the newest recruits are listed.

The last page contains a single profile. Heero slides his glass onto the desk and peers at the photo. It’s a man. He has glasses, and the same washed out expression of all the women against the white background, but Heero can’t fault him on either matter. A stand-up collar, quite a rigid posture. He looks no-nonsense. Sensible. 

“Yes,” Heero decides, and hits the button to proceed. It asks him more questions in a muddle of Mandarin and New Asiatic; the translations are iffy, but he enters all the details it wants - his ID number, name, date of birth. So on and so forth. The fee is steep, but somewhere in the fuzz, Heero caught something about 10 days and contract, and a short course seems ideal. He could spare 10 days. It’s a hike until the diplomats arrive to occupy their buildings and for anyone to start shooting at them. He clicks again to proceed. 

‘Payment successful,’ the website tells him. ‘Something something within the next twenty days.’

“Good.” Heero salutes the screen with his glass, drinks, and forgets the whole thing by the time he pours himself into bed.


	3. Sold

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Wufei makes his ungentle farewell, and heads into the unknown.

‘Sold.’  
   
It’s not the word the notification uses, but that’s what Wufei feels. In spite of the word’s terrible history, he receives it with a sudden throb of the heart. Someone’s done it. Someone out there has paid the price for his freedom.  
   
Wufei forces himself to sit and breathe, calmly, and do nothing but refresh the app on the widget over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over-until-  
   
The file simply materialises under his fingers. It’s such a shock and a relief that he lets out a tiny cry, which he stifles at once. Wufei puts the widget down for a minute, until his focus re-crystalises, and then finally, he opens the file.  
   
There it is.  
   
It’s officiated, with the holographic seal in the corner, his own photograph. A visa. A passport in his own name. That’s important. He came into this world as part of the Chang branch. It feels right to leave L5 under that name. Not ‘Long’ now.  
   
Not with a literal ticket to freedom in his grasp.  
   
The shuttle ticket sobers Wufei again. There are no flights direct from the colony he lives on, so he’d lied about his point of origin. He’s had to do some serious fudging within the app to make any of this possible, but no amount of hacking can redirect a flight to the Long Clan’s home base.  
   
Somehow he needs to get to the edge of the cluster in two days, without anyone knowing.  
   
It’s not exactly a small order.  
   
Belatedly, he thinks to look at who has paid his bride price.  
   
The app has not seen fit to give him a huge quantity of information; presumably in case the bride takes one look at her husband-to-be and decides she’d rather die of whatever horrible disaster she’s looking to avoid on Earth. But he has a name, and an address. Searching shows him one of the China Main new cities; those urban centres for the post-war world that mushroomed up in the years before Wufei was born. Chengshi.  
   
It’s perfectly nondescript, by the sounds of it. Coastal, the information says (no images; L5’s system won’t permit them), with a space port and an industrial centre, and a business centre and high-rise housing.  
   
Wufei pictures the pond in Master Long’s garden and tries to envision it eighteen kilometres wide and as deep, but can’t. Even when he tries to apply the wider waterscape of the aquaculture gardens further down the colony, his mind automatically wants to insert walls.  
   
The name is also a non-starter. Heero Yuy. It tells him nothing. L5’s system raises only one instance of a dead man, from long before the war. Wufei guesses it’s not him.  
   
Heero Yuy. It’s a faceless name. Could be old or young. Seems unlikely to be old Chinese. An ex-colonist? Possible, although Wufei can’t be sure. L5’s information on the movements of other colonists is vague and obscured by jingoism.  
   
Asian? Probably, but not guaranteed. It occurs to Wufei that in his whole life, he’s never seen anyone who didn’t at least superficially resemble himself. The thought sends a little frisson of something too sharp to be excitement at the idea.  
   
What kind of man buys a mail order spouse? Desperate, Wufei presumes. With more money than skill. Lonely, that’s a given, and no doubt socially rejected if he has no one to arrange it for him. Or too ugly. Sterile, maybe.  
   
Wufei leans back in his chair, and considers it further. Perhaps his new fiancee is flawed in some other, deeper way, that prevents him from proceeding with such things in a normal manner. Or perhaps it’s simply that he has no family at all.  
   
He closes the widget app and resolves to deal with the man once he’s met him. He has no fear of violence or of this being a subterfuge in human trafficking; after all, he can hardly be considered defenceless or vulnerable. Wufei almost laughs at the thought.  
   
No; it’ll be some ageing office worker who has reached the stage where pressure and loneliness has precluded remaining unattached any further, or who has found a means of accruing financial gain by obtaining a marriage.  That could be ideal, Wufei concludes. If Heero Yuy wants a convenient arrangement and is content to park Wufei up at his expense in Chengshi for the sake of a tax break, Wufei’s willing.  
   
Up to a point.  
   
Consummation is a bridge he’ll have to decide about crossing or burning to the ground once he’s clapped eyes on the creature and rechecked the legalities of an unconsummated marriage. At least with them both being male, he has options, Wufei supposes, and then curls his lip in distaste at his own thoughts.  
   
He rises, pocketing the widget, and resumes sketching out the plan of action he’s been working on for the past few days. The faster he moves, the better. Tonight, then, with no fanfare and no burdens.  
   
Tonight… a mere six hours from now, he will need to be free of the colony and on his way to pick up the trans-colonial shuttle to L1. And from there, Earth.  
   
Then he has no time at all, he realises. A couple of hours at best to collate whatever possessions he will take with him, and take his leave.  
   
Wufei circuits his rooms, taking real stock of the items in them for the first time in years. Much of it is not his own, and in truth belongs to the rooms themselves as much as any human. He decides against any clothing beyond that which he is already wearing. Presumably clothes can be readily ordered in Chengshi. He wonders what a tailor costs, but no doubt there’s some enterprise where second hand items can be purchased.  
   
His parents’ tablets are in the Long family shrine, which will probably be occupied by the matriarchs if not the priest, and although he’s sorely tempted to steal them anyway, it’s too great a risk. He prays to the house god in his rooms instead, and vows that before clothes, he will have a new tablet made in his parents’ names.      
   
Wufei takes the scant items which are small enough, useful enough or irreplaceable enough to warrant packing, and then comes to a halt in front of the _dao_. His father’s sword. The blade is beautiful; balanced, deadly. Wufei knows the feel of it in his hand better than any other item in this world, and for a moment, a black soaring feeling in his chest makes him hesitate. He lifts it and simply cradles it for a long moment in his arms before drawing it from the scabbard.  
   
Precious time is wasted in this one long farewell but he goes through the forms of his swords-craft without rushing. To rush would be disrespectful. Afterwards, he pushes it into his belt, and turns without another backwards look, out of rooms he will never set foot into again, as if it’s any other day.  
   
___  
   
The hall of the second branch of the Long family is right next to that of the first, where Master Long himself dwells. Wufei slips around the shadow of that great building into the smaller, although no less well-appointed home. Meilan’s home.  
   
As a sign of protest against her own sex, against the marriage proposal, she had moved back to her father’s empty hall and put up the crest of that family at the door fronting her Grandfather’s. The old man typically had brushed her actions off as the hysteria of an unbridled child, and lamented again that his son had died too young to raise her well. So saying, he’d cast an eye at Wufei to imply one more role he felt Wufei should assume. The idea of acting as father figure as well as husband to Meilan had been one that made Wufei regret ever having been born male.  
   
He is admitted to the household, and told that Meilan is in the gardens, but the extent of the chilly welcome ends there. She rises on sight of him, chin up, defences already bristling.  
   
“What are you doing here?”  
   
“You’re reading,” Wufei notes with some surprise. Meilan is no slouch, and throughout their childhood, has been his only academic rival, but it is not an intrinsic love of hers. She studies to goad him, and if possible, to prove herself his better, but she does not enjoy it and would not seek it out without purpose.   
   
Meilan ignores his comment.  
   
“Go away,” she orders. “I don’t want to be seen with you. It’ll encourage ideas and I’d rather die than let people think I’m changing my mind. Why are you carrying that?” she adds, her eyes snapping to the sword at his belt. He takes it off and sets it down on the moss.

He has no idea what, if anything, he should say about his plans. He cannot simply say, “I’m abandoning you,” for all Meilan would say to that is “I don’t need you,” which would be true in full. Nor could he say in more general terms that he intended to betray his status and their colony. Her response would be much the same scorn. Nevertheless, it would be wrong to leave without seeing her.  
   
For all their damaged relationship, Meilan remains the closest to a brother or sister that he has, with all the complexities of a dyad of that type - the jealousy and the antagonism is balanced out against the intrinsic understanding that occurs naturally between two people in similar circumstances. Now and then, there had been togetherness in conflict towards a mutual hate.  
   
“Spar with me,” Wufei says. She balls her fists. She doesn’t say yes, but then she never says no.  
   
They move out into the lawn, kicking off their shoes as their only concession to the fight. Meilan wears no ornaments; no earrings, no necklace, no skirts that could impede her. Her hair is tied back tight behind each ear. Once in a fight when they'd been much younger, he’d pulled her hair. The violence of her rebuke still makes his crotch ache at the memory, and she’s never let him forget the merits of fighting with a gentleman’s honour.  
   
And she’d never let him get within reach of grabbing her hair in a fight again, so in some respects, they’d both learned.    
   
“What are you smirking for? Get ready.”  
   
“I am,” he promises.  
   
They don’t pull their punches, only avoid the ones that would seriously injure. Both of them have the capability to maim with their bare hands, but neither have put such ability to practice, and to seriously hurt one another in a spar would be unthinkable. Sheer talent spares them the worst of injuries, without needing to hold back.  
   
‘She’s focussed today,’ Wufei thinks. His own attention is split, and he wants to win but somehow that’s not the point of the spar. It’s just… communication. She’s puzzled by him, and expresses it by whistling an inelegant kick towards his face.  
   
“Fight me seriously or get out of my house!”  
   
Her fist slithers past his defences but he pulls back in time to avoid being hit. ‘She’s in incredible form today,’ he realises, and it’s with pleasure that he throws his mind wholeheartedly into the bout.  
   
It’s a good fight. By unspoken mutual agreement, it does not last long; only to the first checkmate, and it ends with the sharp point of Meilan’s hand at his throat. She lets him rise, not deigning to wipe the sweat from her hands or her face.  
   
“I’m not satisfied,” she tells him. “You were sloppy. I shouldn’t have won.”  
   
“Next time,” Wufei tells her flatly, “You won’t.”  
   
“Why?” she asks, gesturing to the sword on the grass. She paces back to her book, picking it up and folding the cover under her arm so that he can’t see the title.  
   
“The blade is nicked. I want it repaired, and Long Lijing is the better smith. She’s here, isn’t she?”  
   
“Not right now,” Meilan says, suspicious. “She’s working. How did it get nicked?”  
   
“Training.”  
   
“How careless,” she sneers, but then shrugs dismissively. “Leave it with me. Was there something else you came here to bother me with?”  
   
“No,” Wufei says, knowing that he will miss fighting her. She turns away slightly, attention caught by the sound of a bell deep within the complex, and her profile seems indefatigable. “You’ve grown stronger,” Wufei says.  
   
The rare compliment surprises her and brings out her acid. “Leave now. Just looking at a defeat opponent disgusts me. Particularly a man.”  
   
‘Particularly you,’ she means. She cannot stand the thought of being inferior to a husband any more than she can help scorn one weaker than her. She is stuck, Wufei thinks, on her own pride. No doubt she will do better alone. He finds he has no regrets about leaving her, to the mercy of the clan. No doubt it's more the clan who should be pitied.   
   
“Harness your strength,” he says, the words coming out without thought behind them. Picking his shoes from the moss he leaves her, glad that he decided to spend his last hour here.  
   
“Long Wufei,” Meilan calls after him, and then when he doesn’t turn, she calls again.  
   
“Chang!”  
   
He reaches the gate and walks onward, without turning, back straight. She knows. She must know he’s leaving, but there’s no sound of footsteps behind him; Long Meilan does not run after men.  
   
As he enters the gate, she calls him questioningly for the third time using his baby name, from the time before she was Meilan and he was Wufei and when they might have been any little animals on this colony, learning and fussing at their mothers’ sleeves. Pushing forwards without stopping, he can’t tell what intuition made her use that name. Her call fades quickly, swallowed by the soft verdure of the garden, and he’s through the gate and gone. He has four hours, and thousands of miles to cover, but he walks for a long time away from the hall, so as not to arouse suspicion.


	4. Collection

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Heero receives a job offer and a phone call and is enlightened on the subject of the first of his many errors.

The phone is ringing. Heero would rather not answer it, but it’s the agency and it might result in paid work. As it turns out, it’s nothing but a curtesy call to ensure he’s remembered to drop in this morning to finalise paperwork.

The agency is located in a glossy building in downtown Chengshi. Nothing ostentatious mind, just a new build of high quality but unremarkable architecture, hidden in the cluster of similar offices. It’s difficult to find. All the glass frontages look the same, with like-for-like discrete signage which may or may not list the actual name of the company inside. 

But as it turns out, it’s not a wasted journey. The receptionist passes him up to the secretary, who exchanges his signature on various bits of legal chaff for a memorandum detailing an interview. 

“Could you manage to go there at one o’clock this afternoon?” the secretary asks. 

Heero agrees. It’s not an exciting job, and he’s less than thrilled at the prospect of having to prove himself and make nice to a businessman, but at this point he can’t afford to be picky. Rent’s due. He has a Dorothy-esque voice in the back of his head, which points out with catty enjoyment that if he doesn’t like it, he should’t have gotten himself fired. 

The secretary provides him with the brief; the businessman is one of the stakeholders in the upcoming debate and vote on the independence lobby. Heero doesn’t particularly care which side he’s on, he only hopes he’s not expected to be the man’s personal bodyguard. “Any tips?” he asks.

“I believe Mr. Shen is particularly paranoid about his children. When he was young, he was the victim of an opportunist kidnapping. It was resolved well, but the experience has lingered.” 

Children. Heero’s mood darkens a little. “Noted. Is he bringing his family to the debate?”

“No, but I expect that this is why he’s recruiting additional security. He would have left a portion of his usual staff at home.” 

“Does he speak Japanese or English?”

“Limited,” the secretary says, “Is this a problem?” 

“No,” Heero lies, tucking the dossier on its USB into his inside pocket. “Please let Mr. Shen know that I will be there.” 

‘And hopefully,’ he considers as he rides the elevator back down to the lobby, ‘Mr. Shen can be won over by a display of competence rather than communication.’

He signs out at the reception desk, and nods to the receptionist before heading for the door. Nothing for it but to go back home and study as much New Asiatic as possible in the next few hours but he’s barely over the threshold when his phone rings again. 

The number is not listed, and he frowns before deciding to answer anyway. 

“Yuy.” 

The voice on the other end is male, accented, a little nasal. It paces steadily through a few sentences in Mandarin, until Heero interrupts. 

“I don’t speak Mandarin very well. Do you speak English?” 

“Yes. Is this Mr. Heero Yuy?” 

“Speaking.” 

“This is security control at Chengshi ES Shuttleport. We have a man here whose documents name him as your spousal dependant?”

“My what?”

The man on the other end of the phone repeats the sentence and then rattles on to explain the situation. “His name is Chang Wufei, and his visa is linked to a passport that is registered on our system as yours.” 

Chang Wufei? Heero interrupts again, mind churning. “I need to confirm something. I’ll call back.” 

He marches back into the building and up to the reception desk, where the woman looks up, obviously not expecting him back so soon. 

“Yes?”

“I need to ask you for a favour.” 

Her expression turns cautious. “How can I help?” 

“Tell me what this website is for.” 

Heero brings it up on his phone and holds it out to her. She leans over the desk a little, touching the device with only one finger as she scrolls up and down the homepage, her eyebrows creasing and then rising. “It’s um… an agency for an international marriage matching service.” 

“Buy a bride?” he says. 

“It says… well… yes. It’s for men who want to pay for a marriage.”

“I see. What happens once they’ve paid?” Heero asks. It’s fortunate that he never logged into the website from his phone. At least she can’t see his account or exactly what he’s been up to. 

“May I?” she takes the phone and searches the website for a while, reading, the skin around her eyes creasing in consternation and then flattening out again in understanding. “It seems that once the… transaction has been made, the bride travels independently to the pre-arranged meeting point, after which time the couple has ten days to formalise the marriage.”

“A wedding.” 

“To clear the paperwork,” she corrects. 

“What if they don’t?” 

“Then the groom is reimbursed less the costs of the bride’s initial travel to him and the reasonable price of her deportation, should she be ineligible to remain in the groom’s country of habitation, and her visa is non-transferable. I mean, she can’t simply change it to a 90-day tourist visa. Her leave to enter and remain is tied to her husband’s papers temporarily, until they can legally apply for a spousal visa.” 

“Thank you,” Heero says flatly. “That’s helpful to know.” 

He stalks back outside and recalls the number of the man who had called him. 

“I was contacted just now regarding a man who had arrived at the port referencing my name and travel documents. Yes,” Heero agrees, when the other end of the line confirms his name. “There’s no mistake.”

“Ok, well, he’s being held in spaceport security right now, and there’s still a few issues with his means of arrival; we’re not going to be able to release him unless you come here in person to provide proof of identity. I should warn you, he’s also being held for assault of a security officer, and we have the legal right to detain him until charged and transferred to the civil authority, or bail is posted.”

Heero glances at the man’s profile picture again, and can’t match it to the kind of person who would commit violence, although he’s well aware that appearances can be deceiving.

Curiosity piqued, Heero finds that he’d like to look this stranger in the eye and get the measure of him, even if he arrives only to decide to let the police take him.

“Understood,” Heero says, checking the time. “I’ll collect in approximately one hour.”   
____

The jail is in the salubrious bit of Chengshi ES Shuttleport, in the back end of the complex. The spaceport itself is on the edge of the city, in a dirty scar of land built into the sea. It was once an Alliance base of no great importance, and the level of care given in the upkeep and design of the infrastructure testifies to that. 

Heero clears through the tedium of security and the mindless paperwork needed to merely enter the area, and is led into an even more pragmatic building from where the security staff apparently operate.

He’s greeted after a short wait by none other than the same officer who had telephoned him; who offers no name, merely a hassled expression. He thrusts out a hand towards Heero and says, “Thanks for making it down here so quickly.” 

Heero shakes it and passes him the stack of paperwork and other nonsense he’s spent the last thirty minutes compiling at the desk. The officer flicks through it, smiling thinly and nodding with the air of someone who doesn’t really care that much, having two dozen other more vital things to do that day. 

“I need to see him,” Heero says. 

“Well, you can post bail and then we can release him to your custody. I mean, release him,” The officer’s brow does the same bit of gymnastics that the receptionist’s had.

“I want to see him first. In the jail is fine.” 

The officer pauses. “That’s not typically allowed,” he says slowly, inching around Heero’s stare. Heero is doing it on purpose. He knows it unnerves people. but belatedly, he realises that the officer might understand his question as implying something dirtier than Heero has in mind. 

“So that I can confirm his identity first. Given the circumstances.”

“Right… ok. Yes, that’s fair. You work security right?”

“Yes.”

“Thought so. You stand like… upright. Alright, this way.” 

The officer radios downstairs, his comms device bleeping and crackling. They can’t have much of a budget, Heero thinks, following him through the barred gate of the jail. For security, it’s almost laughable. ‘I could get through this without breaking a sweat.’ 

There aren’t many cells down there, and they’re not old-fashioned lock-ups at least, but proper containment units. There’s another officer parked down here looking gloomy about it. He gestures to a cell and says something which must mean ‘That one’. 

The man in the cell rises automatically from the bench as they approach. He doesn’t use his hands; he can’t, they’re handcuffed, but this is almost an irrelevance. He stands, the loose fit of his clothes making his movement fluid, and waits in silence. 

In life, there’s a lot more to the face than the photo could ever have suggested. He’s not as pale, for one thing. And it gave no hint of his height. 

He’s small. 

However, Heero gets the impression that Chang Wufei is not used to looking up at people. Though there’s not much of a difference between the two of them, the guard has a significant height advantage. Then again, perhaps it’s just the innate confidence in the stranger’s posture. A little implication of pride, maybe that feels that being taller than him is some kind of deliberate insolence. 

Heero in return receives a once-over, an initial expression of surprise is swiftly and carefully crushed into something more arch. ‘He was expecting someone else,’ Heero thinks. ‘Or he didn’t know what I looked like.’

It’s definitely the man from the website, however, no doubt about it. 

“Well?” asks the Officer. 

“Yes,” Heero says. 

“I asked for a lawyer,” the man in the jail says. “Is this him?” 

There’s something about the way that he says it. A cool, slightly nasal voice, the tone finding a sweet spot between sarcasm, politeness and brusque dismissal. Duo would have said it differently, Trowa would have said nothing at all, or something sharper, but it’s the fact that it reminds him of his friends at all that Heero likes. Chang Wufei might be a stranger, but he’s roughly the same species. Same lack of fear. Same nerve. 

‘I want to know who the hell he is,’ Heero thinks. 

The officer is taken aback; however, having expected them to know one another better than this. If their situations were reversed, Heero would find it highly suspicious too. 

“No. My name is Heero Yuy. There’s no problem,” Heero adds to the officer, purposefully staring again. 

“Uh…I’m going to contact the embassy again, just to clear it with them.”

“Go ahead.”

Heero steers the officer towards the stairs by sheer force of his presence in the confined space alone. Behind them there’s a soft clink of metal against metal and Heero doesn’t need to turn to know that Wufei is watching them. Come right up to the bars and curled his hands around them to watch them go. 

At the top, the officer decides against calling the embassy after all. He fusses with the computer a little instead, and eventually resolves to take the feedback from the database and earlier communications as writ. 

Heero takes the bill he’s presented with, stares at the price without wincing, which takes some effort, and then hands over his bank cards. It takes three seconds to process. 

It takes longer for the second officer to bring Wufei up to the lobby. They click the handcuffs off, and the man doesn’t rub his wrists, just lowers his hands back to his sides and waits. It’s not passivity, Heero thinks. It’s conservation of energy. 

Or whatever it is, it keeps the atmosphere in the room a little tense. 

They take Wufei’s prints and there’s yet more paperwork and just as Heero is getting frustrated, the officer says. “That’s it.” 

There is a pregnant pause in which the officer looks to them both to do something, and Wufei looks to the window, and Heero waits. Finally, when it drags on a heartbeat too long, Heero points out, “You haven’t given him his stuff.” 

“What stuff?” the officer asks. “We didn’t take anything. He didn’t have anything.” 

“Nothing?” 

Wufei turns his head slowly back from the window, unblinking and deliberately unashamed. Heero glances over the white outfit. There are pockets in the jacket, but not the pants. Wufei tucks his hands into his sleeves with so-so indifference. Like a cat washing. 

Nothing. 

‘Destitute?’ Heero wonders. The clothes don’t look it, but as he well knows, appearances can be deceiving. But still. 

Nothing. 

Even Duo travels with a knife and a comb. 

At any rate, there’s no point in waiting around. “My car’s in the lot,” Heero says instead, nodding to the officer. Wufei likewise gives a fraction of a bow in their direction and with only a momentary caution, steps out of the door ahead of Heero at Heero’s mute insistence. 

Now what?

Heero checks his watch. So much for studying. “I’ll take you back,” he says, “And then I need to go to an interview. Are you listening?” 

“Yes,” Chang Wufei replies, but his eyes are turned upwards to the cloudwashed sky and the arrowhead shapes of the seabirds at altitude, distantly calling.


	5. Arrival; Departure

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Wufei's arrival is summarised, Heero asks some pertinant questions, and Wufei debates the fair price of freedom.

Coming through atmosphere had been an experience. After the long approach to the blue planet, Wufei had been disappointed to break through the cloud cover and discover that Chengshi was largely grey and cold. He had not had much time to take much in, however, with the narrow viewport of the transport and the fact that it was bucking hard at the controls. In retrospect, he might have been going too fast. 

Once landed, they’d hauled him out of the ship, and after a slight miscommunication, decided to use the diplomacy of gunfire, at which point Wufei had decided to be more flexible about how the situation was going to pan out, and stopped trying to apply his fist to the nearest officer’s face. Guns are loud. The retort had been like a tyre exploding next to his head. Rather exciting to him, but he has to conclude that guns are not elegant. Wufei doesn’t know whether it’s just the training of L5 talking, but in his heart the use of a gun is cheating. The lazy man’s way to obtain a cheap, unskilled victory. 

But conversely, this might be the reason why the Long Clan was so easily exiled. A perspective to ruminate on, anyway.

After his surrender, they’d bundled him into the building and then downstairs to that windowless cell, and left him to cool his heels, and get cold and stiff and bored. And aware of how many hours it had been since he last ate or slept. 

He had also been troubled to learn that the language is odd. Everyone here has an uncouth accent, which makes them sound like they’re talking with one finger up their nose and a rice ball under their tongue, and he doesn’t like it. Mimicking it seems to ease communications, but makes him want to spit afterwards. Thankfully, Han characters have persisted unchanged for the past millennia, and he had little trouble with the paperwork. 

And then sooner than expected, someone had arrived for him. 

The sound of the guard’s radio crackling had been the first clue that things were finally in motion. The tread of feet on the metal stairs down the jail had been misleading - the sound had echoed in the narrow corridor so that it was impossible to tell if the people descending were heavy or light, or even what shoes they were wearing. 

The man who approaches is surprising. The guards, both ethnically Chinese, might have had an otherness about them compared to the people of L5, but this man was so extraordinary that Wufei had no idea how to react. So he’d said nothing, and stared like a mute until the blunt speech and curiosity prompted him to ask a stupid question instead. 

Deep down he’d expected the answer, but it still jarred to hear it confirmed.. 

So this was Heero Yuy.

Wufei had somehow expected a neat, professional outfit. In his mind’s eye it had always been there in his vague imaginings of the man who had bought him, but he hadn’t envisaged a suit of such a Western extraction, and he hadn’t been at all accurate about the man inside of it. 

The fact that they were much the same age struck him first; he’d expected someone significantly older, and the second thought that had landed was of the man’s foreignness. And then all too quickly, he was turning on his heel and walking away. Drawn to the bars, Wufei watches him go, almost eclipsed by the big officer. 

This is a complication he hadn’t banked on. Wufei hadn’t predicted this any more than he’d entertained an idea that Heero was a woman, or a dog. 

But then within minutes, the radio is crackling again and he’s treading upwards on the ringing stairs out of the jail, and the handcuffs have been snickered away. The officer makes a little gesture between the two of them as if to say, ‘Well, there you are. He’s yours now,’ and Wufei supposes that he is. 

It’s not quite a comfortable feeling. Particularly with the way the man looks at him. 

And then the embarrassment over the luggage. Wufei removes himself from the conversation without outwardly moving, and reminds himself of the old adage that a rich man has all four limbs, his loins and his wits, and a man with his wits and his loins alone can be wealthy.

“My car’s in the parking lot,” Heero Yuy tells him, as if Wufei needs telling. Better go before anyone changes their minds anyway. Once he’s in the city, he can assess his situation, gather his resources and… do something. ‘Vanish, if I have to,’ Wufei thinks. 

Stepping out into the lot; however, his thoughts scatter. Humans have more than 5 senses, and since landing Wufei is becoming increasingly aware that he has some innate sense of space around him. It’s not anything tangible, but deep-seated part of his animal brain recognises the difference between ceiling and sky. And the height of it. 

More than a kilometer, anyway, with a lack of solidity. And full of things. A noise like an alarm drags his attention up, where shapes like paper kites are making loose circles against the dirty clouds. Looking up makes his head swim with sudden virtigo, so naturally he keeps doing it, breathing instead to control the sensation which gives him the sense that he’s about to fall upwards into the void. The light and the haze of cloud plays havoc with his retinas, making sparks of light swarm across his vision, like a cloud of little flies, each and every one haloed in white. 

“Are you listening?” Heero demands. 

“Yes,” Wufei says, automatically, tracking the movement of one of the kites and realising with a silent thud that it is alive. 

“Get in.” Heero says, and it’s still an order but the tone is less irritable. 

Wufei eases into the vehicle, satisfied to find padded seating after the rudimentary bucket seat of the freighter he’d arrived in, and the metal bench of the prison. His ease doesn’t last long, however. Trapped in the car together, they sink into a silence that Wufei feels he has no right to break. At least, he’s aware that this man has just spent an inordinate amount of money on him, and it seems bad form not to at least defer a little respect to that. 

They pull out of the lot onto the highway, and then the man finally speaks to him. It’s not the question that Wufei expects. 

“What’s your name?”

“Chang Wufei,” he replies, unable to prevent himself from sounding offended. “I didn’t lie. It’s a real visa, with my real name.” 

They had confirmed with the China Main embassy that the visa was legitimate, which was something. Not prone to nerves, Wufei had nevertheless waited with flurry of disquiet in his core. He had no plan if they decided to revoke it, and deportation would deliver him back to the repercussions of an angry Master, and the disgust of his people. 

Waiting in the jail, he’d gone over the worst case scenarios, in which the humiliation of the punishment designed for him would be worse than the pain. He’d rather be executed than pilloried. 

Heero presents him with a statement, breaking into his thoughts. 

“They said you arrived in a tiny freighter, with no flight plan, and no cargo.” 

It had been the easiest one to hack and pilot without more advanced training; a battered old junk fit only for shifting waste and raw produce between colonies. It had once been fit for shuttling between Earth and L5, but Wufei doubted if it would even get airborne again now. He doesn’t know where the Shuttleport people have dragged the hulk to, and doesn’t care. 

Outloud, Wufei acknowledges the statement with a grunt. “I didn’t want to bring the cabbages along,” he says, recalling how they’d bounced like mad toys all over the cargo bay. 

Heero stares down the road ahead, unreadable. When Wufei checks, there’s a funny little pull of muscle in the corner of his mouth which could be distain or could be amusement. Impossible tell. In silence, he negotiates the intersection, then he asks, as if to keep the conversation on the safe side, “Should I call you Chang, or Wufei?” 

Wufei opens his mouth to say ‘Chang’ of course, and then reconsiders. The man had bailed him. He hadn’t had to, and he had shown a certain amount of brusque consideration that implied they were on the same side, even if not quite allies. 

“You may call me Wufei,” he concludes, as he has nothing else to give back. He supposes it’s a small concession. And it seems people use first names here. Heero was ‘Heero’. Not ‘Yuy’. 

Heero takes his answer at face value and lapses into silence again. Wufei stretches a sore leg into the footwell, and holds in a sigh. There's nothing outside to hold his attention. The highway runs on between the trammels of its walls, the view ahead blocked by the rear end of a truck. It’s pragmatic architecture, and it could be anywhere. 

As the miles drag on, Wufei gives up sitting so carefully. His back aches from the impact of landing and he leans one elbow on the edge of the window, head turned away into his own hand. Heero stares straight ahead down the road at the rear lights in front of them. Wufei would like to believe that Heero’s sneaking glances at him, but if he is, Wufei can’t catch him at it. 

A gloom settles over him. The air outside looks dirty, and the weather is unsettled like the mechanism is broken. Wufei senses that in Heero there’s no easy push over, and the part of him that would normally rise to the challenge is wary. There’s so much else he must contend with, and overcome. 

He observes Heero from the corner of his eye, adding depth to his first impression. The man doesn’t reveal much. He’s still, and focussed. The officers in the port had been trained to hold themselves to attention but for this man it’s second nature, to such an extent that it’s either a sign of great self-composure or a defect. The features of the face make him look young but there’s a scour across his skin and in the fine lines of his hands which suggests otherwise. So perhaps he is older, then? Or perhaps it’s just the symptom of past hard living. 

He has callouses on his hands, and muscle on his frame. Wufei can see it even so disguised by the suit, and it’s not vanity muscle either. Wufei wonders where he comes from. Not Changshi, anyway. Nobody’s native to Changshi. And he’s not Chinese. Maybe mixed? The man’s skin is a colour that could be from anywhere, but he has an eye colour that Wufei has only ever seen in cats before. 

Even as he thinks this, they flick towards him, the glassy blue a lens for an attention and intellect that makes a prickle go around Wufei’s neck.

“Nervous?”

“No,” Wufei bites back, startled.

The spotlight lingers and then thankfully slips back to the road. 

“You didn’t know what I looked like,” Heero says. He doesn’t turn his head but his attention nevertheless sweeps back, prying at Wufei. 

Wufei moves his tongue against the dehydrated roof of his mouth and wields honesty like a club in lieu of anything better.

“I thought you’d be…old. Maybe fat and ugly. Pitiable.” 

Another of those faint pulls at Heero’s mouth. Does he have a sense of humour? Nettled, Wufei wants to test him. He sours his expression a little, lest Heero think he’s delivering any kind of backhanded compliment. 

Heero drums his fingers on the steering wheel. “So you’re a scam artist. Why shouldn’t I drive you back to the police?”

“I’m non-refundable. No returns. Sorry,” Wufei adds, not a bit remorseful about that.

“I’m not rich,” Heero replies, slowing as the speed limit changes on the approach to the city. “And I don’t like being used. Make no mistake, I have no qualms about dumping you back in jail.” 

“Noted…Then why did you pay it?”

The cat eyes blink. “Because you flew here in a cabbage trailer. And I didn’t see anyone else around who would do it.”

It’s a concession. Wufei opens his mouth and then closes it again, stymied. Now he’s openly staring again, only this time it’s not ineffective. There’s a slight thaw in the other man, or at least, a fraction more humanity. 

“You could have walked away. They would have let you.” 

“Yes,” Heero agrees, tone flat but not cruel. “But it was my mistake that got you here.” 

“Mistake?”

“It’s irrelevant now. Put it this way, you arrived. How you did that is your responsibility. But now you’re here, it’s mine.” 

It’s not flattering to be labelled as an accident, Wufei finds. Nor as someone else’s responsibility. Bridling, he turns in the seat. 

“I don’t need you to be responsible for me. I appreciate the help but I don’t intend to be a burden on you. And I will pay you back.”

Heero’s head turns towards him like he’s pulled it on a string. “Do you have any money?” Heero asks, with real curiosity. 

Wufei looks away again out of the window, regret brewing up acrid in the back of his throat. Old regret. And regret still to come. 

“Not yet…”

The other man shrugs. “I paid the bail with fuck-off-money anyway. It doesn’t matter,” he says, as though the conversation is over. 

“I said I’d pay,” Wufei says, waspish. He can hear it in his own voice, the defensiveness, the wounded ego, and hastens to correct himself. “I can pay.” 

The other man makes a noise of dismissal. “I don’t want money.” His emphasis on the last word makes Wufei pause again. If not money, then what? Services? Servitude? 

The enormity of the debt suddenly hits home, and that’s merely the financial debt. Heero can have no idea where Wufei has escaped from, nor who he is. Merely sitting here is a miracle unfathomable for someone on his colony for not just decades but generations. Honour dictates that debt must be cleared, pride dictates that to have Heero hold the advantage over him like this is unbearable. Better to even their standing as soon as possible, and let the ends justify the means, even if those means are in conflict with his other values. 

‘Do I need him?’ Wufei asks himself. 

First answer: No. He doesn’t need any help. 

Second answer: Yes. At least… for now. 

How much? 

‘How much is my freedom worth?’ 

It’s a deep down calculation that doesn’t fit into words. Like his sense that the sky is the sky, Wufei gets the sense of Heero Yuy as another human. Not old, not fat, not pitiable. 

‘Dangerous’ his gut says, ‘a man like a gun waiting to go off’.

Inelegant, then. But exciting. 

Wufei lets his gaze burns into the side of Heero’s head for a long moment, until Heero meets his eye again. 

Then quietly, he asks, “What do you want?” 

Heero jerks his head back towards the bumper of the truck in front, expression closing off suddenly. 

“I don’t want anything,” he replies sharply. He presses his foot down on the accelerator, winging the car out around the truck, and the conversation dies with a soft bump as the motion makes Wufei slide into the car door.


	6. Traffic Talking

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Heero and Wufei go for a car ride and prod each others buttons to see where the explosives are, Heero acquires an interpreter, and Wufei takes charge.

Traffic entering Chengshi crawls. The come out of the funnel of the circular highway, right into the main artery of the city, just in time to meet the lunch hour rush. Heero glowers, hiding behind road rage so as not to look at Wufei again - in case he looks back. 

The charged atmosphere in the car gives Heero a creepy, unclean feeling, and for a moment he has half a mind to pull over, push the passenger side door open and point at the sidewalk, and then it fades. Wufei seems too aware of his gaffe. 

More than the offer made, Heero’s disgusted with the little part of himself that had liked it. That he could have said anything, and Wufei would probably have accepted. It brings home to roost the seriousness of the matter. Heero has said that he’s willing to accept the consequences of his error, but now he realises the depth of that. 

Wherever the other man has come from, it must be a place he cannot go back to. Or else that where he has come from is so substantially worse than surrender to a stranger that it makes any compromise bearable. And Wufei is not someone who has been brought low by life yet, Heero knows this. It’s not possible. Wufei bears himself with too much confidence, and too much inexperience. 

But even if that kind of offer was second nature to Wufei, Heero believes that it’s still not right to have that much power over anyone. 

‘I don’t want anything on those terms,’ he thinks again. 

Wufei has retreated into a chilly silence. He’s not persisted or wheedled over the offer, which suggests relief that Heero wouldn’t put it into words for him, yet at the same time, he seems offended. 

In the end, necessity forces them back into speaking, and onto a change of topic. 

“I need to go to an interview. I won’t have time to take you anywhere else.”

“What kind of interview?” Wufei’s tone inches into polite inquiry, though his face still sulks. 

“A potential client. You don’t have to come in,” Heero says. He’s not clear how long Shen will want to interrogate him for, or what tests the interview might entail. It could be a while, and he can’t leave Wufei sat waiting in the car like a pet. There’s not even a bottle of water.

Heero scans the roadside for a cafe or suchlike, but the route he needs has forced them into the central area, and the only ones he can see are lounges private to the highrises that they’re squatting under. He frowns harder down the road.

“What sort of work?” Wufei is asking. 

“Security.” 

“Ah,” Wufei says lightly. A noise like a penny dropping. 

“Mainly communications.” 

“Never personal.” Wufei presumes, wryly, and Heero is hard pressed not to let it amuse him. First the comment about the cabbages, then the no-returns policy. Unexpectedly, Wufei has something of the same sense of humour as him. 

“Sometimes,” Heero admits. 

“Oh? What kind of people?” 

“Only those I care about.” 

Wufei doesn’t have an answer for that. 

“I could give you and cash and directions,” Heero says, inadvertently making the suggestion brusque. 

“If you mean leave then stop here and I’ll go,” Wufei replies. “Give me your card and I’ll see that payment is forwarded to you in due course.” 

Heero considers, and then lets the matter drop. He’s not passing over his house keys to a stranger; he doesn’t know anywhere else. “I didn’t mean that,” he mutters, and then louder, says, “The interview might take a while. You’d have to wait.” 

“I don’t mind waiting,” Wufei says, although his tone has a cool edge to it. He eyes the buildings outside and Heero senses a kind of reluctance in how he is observing them. Why’s that? Wufei’s not intimidated by the city, Heero notes, and it’s not until Wufei blinks that he gets it. 

“Long trip?” 

“I’m fine.” 

“You’re tired. Jet lag.” 

“I’m fine,” Wufei repeats.

Heero calculates the distances and the odds, and says, “L3 or L5?” 

“Five,” Wufei says quietly. “It’s still legal.” 

“Is it?” 

“Newly legal,” Wufei amends. 

“Ah.” 

Five. The closed colonies. Heero brings to mind all he knows about them, which is little to begin with and precious little that he’d actually trust to be true. Old habitats, almost from the first days of the colony drive - some of them aren’t even toruses, just tubes with crumbling infrastructure, occupied by criminals forced from Earth, or cultists, or undesirables. It’s a mystery how they struggle on, a weird blot in the whole Earth Sphere system; next to no trade, next to no interest. 

They had barely even been involved in the war. 

Out loud, Heero says. “No wonder you were so cheap.” 

Unexpectedly, Wufei snorts. A horsey noise, part scorn and part laugh, though he turns his face away and won’t let Heero see if it really is a laugh or not. 

‘He’s a good person,’ Heero thinks; a thought which is immediately followed by, ‘He’s going to cause me all kinds of trouble.’ 

Speaking of trouble, he’s cutting it fine to reach this interview on time. 

Heero checks the dashboard clock and is irked to notice that the delay means he’s going to make it, but without much leeway to solve the problem of what to do with Wufei. He weighs his options. Take the man into the building with him, apologise and perhaps leave him in a lobby somewhere? Wouldn’t be terribly professional. 

Pull up at the building, turn Wufei out and let him roam around until such time as the interview is over. Heero glances at Wufei and silently puts a question mark next to it. There’s a chance Wufei might see that as a redux of his earlier suggestion. He might not come back. Would that be a good thing or a bad thing? Heero can’t decide, but the creeping sense of responsibility tells him that this should probably be a last resort. 

Or leave Wufei the car. 

“There’s no good place to drop you near here,” Heero says. “Can you drive?” 

“I’m not licensed to.” 

“That’s not what I asked.” 

Interest rises in Wufei’s face. “I flew a freighter here,” he points out. “It’s not like the traffic is faster or more dangerous than that.”

“If I give you my keys are you going to steal my car?”

“No.” 

“Good. I wouldn’t recommend it.” 

“No need to resort to threats. I’m not a thief.” Wufei spits the word. “My word is my honour and I have no need to stoop to meet your standards.” 

“Understood,” Heero says, recoiling from the botched attempt at humour. “And agreed, my standards are low.” He steers the car into the Shen building parking basement. 

“Huh,” Wufei scoffs, thumping back in his seat. 

“You remind me of someone,” Heero mutters, without elaborating. No time, anyway. They’ve idled up to and been swallowed by the security gate; a monstrous meshed contraption, with two gates; one for in, and one for out. Like an airlock. Heero’s begrudgingly impressed. The guard emerges, shining a torch into the already well-lit interior of the car. His companion walks around it, one hand on the gun at his belt, and inspects the bumpers, exhaust. 

“Heero Yuy,” Heero says, rolling down the window. The first guard inspects his face against a console, and then utters a clipped sentence. 

“I have clearance.”

Another sentence, incomprehensible. “I have clearance. Move aside,” Heero repeats. 

“He wants you to open the front,” Wufei mutters. 

“Waste of time,” Heero growls, popping the hood from the inside. They’re ushered from the car whilst the second guard inspects the engine and then they have to repeat the same process with the trunk. It’s only after this that they issue Heero and the car with separate passes and then the torch is turned again on Wufei with a curt enquiry. 

“Driver,” Heero grunts, “No pass.” 

“You speak Mandarin like a neanderthal,” Wufei comments, turning to look down on him in more ways than one. “Who taught you?”

“No one. Tell the guard that you’re leaving and don’t need clearance.” 

Wufei give him a flat look and then turns and addresses both guards with a fluid imperial brand of Chinese that leaves Heero floundering for the gist of the speech. The guard goes from cold efficiency to then a kind of bewildered deference. Heero stares. 

Then to his amazement, Wufei submits to a pat-down. 

“With you?” The guard queries, in English. Heero can only nod and with that, a pass is punched out of the machine, and they’re gestured back towards the car. 

Heero stops dead. “You’re not coming in.” 

“You want a job,” Wufei says, hooking the lanyard around his neck. “How do you expect to achieve that when you don’t even speak the language? I can interpret, or failing that, maybe one of us will leave here with employment. Now get in the car.”

Heero doesn’t move. Considering his military and police history, he’s quite used to taking orders, but only when it counts. He humours authority as a matter of social necessity, but mainly in his experience, authority neither knows what it’s doing nor knows his capabilities, and very few individuals are worth his consideration. 

“Don’t tell me what to do.” 

“Then stand there like a cow,” Wufei says and gets into the car. 

The silence and awkwardness expand until Heero stiffly marches around to the driver’s seat, where he slams the door. 

“A cow?” 

“Moo,” Wufei says mockingly. “Drive forward, the gate’s open.”

“I can see that!” 

Heero accelerates, making the car jerk and then swings it at once into a parking space. 

“Huh,” Wufei says again, this time satisfied. He gets out, just as the lift dings and a man steps out, clipboard in hand, evidently expecting them. 

“Yuy?” 

“Here,” Heero replies, getting out. He shoots a look at Wufei, who ignores it. The clipboard switches to smooth Mandarin, flicking his pen towards the elevator. “Proceed up to the sixteenth floor.” Then he saunters past them towards the guard booth. 

“Proceed,” Wufei echoes. Heero boils across the empty space, and is annoyed to find that Wufei isn’t at all bothered by his bad temper. Some of it is directed inwards, anyway. ‘Damn him,’ Heero thinks, and then lets the matter go. Too late now, and no need to let it interfere with his work. 

‘Hot anger, cold revenge,’ as Trowa puts it, but as soon as the thought flits through Heero’s mind, he wants to retract it. 

‘He’s here. It’s a resource,’ Heero considers. ‘Use him.’

The elevator closes with a soft noise, and they rise. 

“Shen is a politician and a large trading company owner,” Heero says, voice low. “He’s paranoid about kidnapping, speaks a moderate amount of Japanese at least, and needs new security for a conference he’ll be attending next week. I’m applying to oversee his cyber security; he may also require more active security services.”

“Noted,” Wufei says, ear tilted towards Heero as he listens. “Any known threats?” 

“It’s for the Independence Vote,” Heero says, “but Shen’s a detractor. Of course there are threats.”

“Specific?”

“Generic so far.” 

“Noted,” Wufei says, and then, his words blurred by the hush of the elevator doors opening, adds ‘good luck’, so quietly that Heero’s not sure that he’s said it at all.  
____


	7. Tested.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which testing reveals a possibility of friendship, a storm brews, and both are introduced to a new perspective but only Heero comes anywhere close to enjoying it.

The sixteenth floor of Shen’s building may as well be the basement, for all the view they’re allowed to see from it. Heero reasons that they’re in the core of the building; high security, in the dead floors between the top of the building and the more active lower levels. They’re spat out of the lift into a soulless lobby, where another suit with a gun checks their ID and gestures to the chairs, which both decline.

The clipboard arrives leisurely some 10 minutes later. Heero would put money on a wager that the man has been making them wait deliberately, but he won’t have got much from it. Neither of them are fidgets or idle talkers.

‘Must have been a boring show,’ Heero reflects. The CCTV is obvious.

“This way,” says the clipboard, introducing himself as Wen, one of Mr. Shen’s many aides de camp. He leads them from the soulless lobby into a soulless, windowless corridor, to another chair and a door.

“Our process is three parts,” Wen explains, glancing them both over. “Firstly, skills aptitude. Secondly, physical test. Last, interview. Understood?”

“Yes,” Heero says, for them both.

“This test now is aptitude. One at a time, please. The other wait there.”

Wufei nods to Heero, folding into the seat with his hands on his lap. Wen opens the door outward, blocking Wufei’s view of the inside of the office, and gestures Heero inside. Heero flicks one glance back, and Wufei nods again.

Inside, Heero finds a small office; little more than a desk and a chair, and a laptop placed on the table. There’s a window, a small stack of files. No very personal items, although there’s a scribble of calligraphy on the wall. Nothing more.

“This office and computer belongs to one of Mr. Shen’s employees. Mr. Shen believes that he is not entirely loyal to our company. Perhaps a spy. Please determine if this is the case. Take as long as you think you need, but no more than one hour. I advise you to say nothing, except when you are finished.”

“Understood.”

Heero glances over the desk and machine, checking for any obvious or less obvious tampering, but there’s nothing that catches his attention. It doesn’t take him too long to bypass the password system on the machine and begin poking around. Business documents are a context in which he can read enough Chinese to get the gist, and it’s easier than he’d expected to identify a few files which have been misleadingly titled. There’s a folder of porn tidied into an otherwise boring looking set of documents, but that’s standard, in Heero’s experience. Flipping his approach he pops the hood on the software and gives it a thorough health check.

“I’m finished,” he says, when he’s done only fifteen minutes later. He could have worked faster, but he doesn’t want to seem careless.

“Thank you.”

They return to the corridor, Wufei passing a look of concealed curiosity as they swap places. Heero sits. The door closes. He can hear Wen going through the same soft speech and settles in to wait. He’s curious as well. Last he ever heard, the technology on the L5 colonies was lagging significantly behind, but perhaps that was all hearsay and propaganda. Still, he’s confident enough in his own abilities that he expects Wufei to take longer. Only Duo could probably find the answer to the problem faster.

“I have finished,” Wufei says from inside the room. Heero stiffens in the chair.

That’s not possible.

“Are you certain?” Wen is asking.

“Yes.”

The door opens, and Wufei pauses on sight of Heero, who is aware that he is scowling.

Wen closes the door of the office and pauses as well. “Physical test,” he says, gesturing them back down the corridor. Wufei is looking thoughtful, like he may be having second thoughts, but he says nothing and walks ahead down the corridor without any outward bother. Heero pins a glare to the back of Wufei’s head.

How did he hack it faster? Decryption is decryption; it takes time. Heero has a sudden horrible thought that maybe the key was scribbled down somewhere on the desk, perfectly obvious, only he’d overlooked it due to his weaker grasp of the language. He represses a wave of infuriation at the thought - too late for that now.

‘I need to learn,’ Heero thinks, stepping into the lift. He stares at the lift doors, Wufei now behind him, and imagines wringing Mandarin out of the other man like water.

Damn him.

The door hushes open, now the basement, and Wen gestures them ahead. “The physical test,” he announces and dispatches them out into the ring.

_____

The expense of digging this out near sea level must have been astronomical, Heero thinks, stepping out into a basement like a parking lot. In fact, it must be below the parking lot, and although the headspace isn’t great, it contains the great sprung floor of a dojo.

Wen does not step out of the lift, gliding away with the machine. No doubt to watch from some other point. There’s a number of men waiting in the dojo, and one strolls towards them with the lean, musculature of a doberman.

‘Shen’s main dog,’ Heero thinks.

The man is brusque, and obviously in charge. He snaps something at them both, which Heero can’t follow, and he doesn’t gesture to clarify himself either.

“Take your shoes off,” Wufei says, toeing off his shoes. Heero stoops and unlaces, balling his socks into the heels.

Wufei glances at him. “Can you fight in that?”

“Yes,” Heero says, but the suit is relatively new and he slides the jacket off and leaves it folded by his shoes, rather than risk it. The pants are bespoke, at least. They should survive, or if they don’t, his tailor didn’t listen to the brief well enough and owes him his money back.

Wufei folds his hands into the sleeves of his own jacket and goes still, listening. The leader is making a kind of speech, which bores Heero and would do so even if he could follow more than the gist.

“You don’t need to do this part,” Heero says, speaking over him.

Wufei frowns. “I did the first test. I’ll do this test too.”

Heero scowls back. “This isn’t your job.”

“It isn’t yours yet either,” Wufei points out, and steps up onto the mat with a bow to the leader. Irked, Heero follows. Half of the men by the wall detaches, stepping up and dispersing themselves around the edges. Six men. They wear the same dark grey clothes, loose pants and shirts. They have a similar look to them, despite having come from apparently a very diverse hiring pool. Heero spots a face he would bet is from Stan-Russian borders, and another behind a beard suggestive of the central east.

All foreigners, in fact.

‘Just more established here than at home,’ Heero thinks. In theory, then, he should fit right in. Given that he’s never had a home, per se.

He supposes the leader meant for a three-on-one trial, but given that there’s two of them, he’s beckoned up most of the men for more of a battle royale. Wufei confirms this a moment later.

“Eliminate everyone on the mat,” Wufei translates.

“Eliminate?”

“Knock them out,” Wufei says, tapping his own jaw with his fist, “Or knock them out.” he makes a little pushing gesture towards the edge of the mat.

“Understood,” Heero says, rising, testing the springy surface with his weight. It’s a big space. He doesn’t roll his shoulders or anything, preferring stillness. It makes him harder to read.

He just needs to take out more than Wufei.

As good as done.

The leader hops off the mat, and barks a command, and there’s a coliseum thrill in the air when the men on the mat, the men by the wall, roar back. Heero smirks, and picks the two most likely to pick him first. Wufei just stands there like a secretary, hands tucked in his sleeves.

It begins quickly enough. The bearded guy rolls forward, surprisingly graceful, and with sudden aggression whips the fight into action.

It’s all a little fake, in Heero’s opinion. If this were a bar fight, or a street fight with a gang, there’d be some foreplay - hooting and chest thumping, a whole lot of machismo to get the blood pumping and tempers hot, and that’s all to his advantage because he can flatten that like a cold wave and that frightens them. If this were a real fight between him and a determined murderer, it would be more intimate and more brutal.

This kind of stuff just feels like games, and it grieves him because he’s supposed to show his best, but how can he when his best would land someone in the hospital?

Heero avoids the punches thrown his way and simply seeks to flatten his opponent as quickly as possible. Wufei is weaving on the mat, seeming working to a similar agenda. Heero ignores him, for the moment. The bearded guy is good. He boxes, and he’s fast and he has some dancing moves that make him hard to hit. He’s also, Heero thinks, crazy. The man grins, but it’s teeth bared against the same restraint that Heero is working to.

‘I’d like to fight him for real,’ Heero thinks, ducking to one side and in frustration, bodily throwing one of the beard’s comrades off the mat with both fists. The man lands hard on the concrete and rolls, wincing up when the leader yells at him. The beard yells back and then abruptly, Heero has to jerk his face out of the way of a fist that gleams.

Knuckle dusters.

Now that’s more like it.

The men at the wall detach, tossing items to their peers. Bamboo canes, other dojo paraphernalia. No real weaponary other than the beard’s knuckle dusters, but enough to injure badly if used seriously and with sufficient talent.

Heero pushes his fist into a face stupid enough to come within reach, only just remembering to pull his punch in time. There’s still a squeal and a rush of blood, but Heero takes stock and that’s two men down, four to go.

Behind him, Wufei gives a sudden yell of bad temper, swiftly followed by the crack of wood hitting flesh. A body bounces past Heero on the mat, coming to the very brink of the space and stopping there, groaning. He turns back to see Wufei, wooden sword in hand, looking disarrayed and pissed off.

The hell just happened?

No time to worry about it. Wufei takes on the beard, laying the sword in against the brass knuckles, and the beard is grinning like a dog with the fun of it, dancing.

Heero turns to address the last two; the Stan-Russian and a dark, skinny bit of wire. Neither of them are feeling it the way that the beard is, both perhaps bored, or just cowardly. Heero doesn’t care much which.

The wire is too considered in his approach, too analytical for an opponent like Heero and although his skills might be good, he waits to see what Heero will do and in that interlude, Heero punches him twice. Once down, the wire concludes that he has made sufficient effort and stays down.

The Russian, with the benefit of height and weight over Heero, decides to bring it in close and wrestle.

With distaste, Heero corrects him, and then turns back to discover that the fight is over. At least, Wufei is stood there, steaming, with a broken piece of bamboo in his hand and the beard out cold at his feet.

Heero vaguely recalls there had been some yelling while he was busy. Wufei locks eyes with him and drops the bust sword, kicking it aside with contempt. Heero bristles. Or shivers.

Something in between.

Heero turns to him a little more, and the leader is saying something, at which Wufei starts to rein himself back.

‘No,’ Heero thinks, ‘Not yet!’

Out loud he says, “He said to eliminate everyone on the mat.”

Wufei’s expression flickers, unreadable, the air conditioning making the hair pulled loose from his ponytail waver around his neck.

Heero sinks into his heels, but makes no motion to beckon Wufei forward, nor to defend himself. It just simply isn’t over yet.

The leader at the ringside is still barking, but it’s no kind of distraction. Wufei stares back, a hard dark stare, and then even as Heero waits, something comes alive in it.

‘Finally,’ Heero thinks, but before he’s even finished the thought, they’ve begun.

Heero hardly sees the first strike coming, jerking his head back hard to avoid being hit at the last moment. Wufei’s fist glances off his chin, the impact still hard enough to send a static of pain up each side of his jaw.

‘That was real!’ Heero thinks in a flash, weaving out of the reach of another blow. ‘He wasn’t trying before?’

Even in the pitch of the fight, Heero is flattered. And surprised. He’d never have guessed at this level of ability. Competency maybe, but not - he jerks his head back to avoid another ringing smack to the head and finds himself being chased around the mat on the defensive.

‘He’s fast!’

And bold. Wufei pushes forward, and then demonstrates the weaknesses in Heero’s defence with a series of kicks that knock the air out of him. Heero drops and rolls out of reach, hacking out a cough.

‘He can fight,’ Heero thinks, with a rush of energy. ‘He might win.’

Not possible.

He bunches his muscles and drives upwards into Wufei’s space, ignoring strategy for simple animal ferocity. Of the two of them, Heero is certain that he has the weight advantage, and more raw power. Wufei thumps a knee into his side, a knuckle into his solar plexus, but falls back, giving Heero unexpected room to swing.

His fist cracks into the side of Wufei’s face with ease, right on the sweet spot of the jaw. The fact that it connects at all is unexpected and Heero botches the follow through because Wufei should have seen it coming and dodged or defended, and in the split moment that mattered, he didn’t. Too late now. Wufei’s head snaps back and he tumbles off the edge of the mat, leaving Heero stood there alone, a unwitting champion.

In the uproar, Heero watches dumbfounded as Wufei staggers up, wiping blood from his mouth and shaking his head slightly. Heero unclenches and clenches his fist. His hand hurts.

‘Didn’t mean to hit him that hard,’ he thinks, and then a doubt creeps in. ‘Did he let me do that?’

Heero has no time to think about it, the leader marshalling his gang back into order and Wen oiling across the floor, clapping politely as if this were a round of golf. “Remarkable,” he comments. “If you would like to collect your belongings.”

Wen leaves them while he passes a hushed conversation with the leader. Heero pulls on his jacket and shoes. Wufei’s gone quiet again, the red mark on his face blooming.

“Where did you train?” Heero asks.

“Did you? You fight like someone glued your feet to the floor.”

Heero rises. “Hasn’t stopped me so far.”

“It might,” Wufei mutters, and falls silent when Wen approaches.

“Very good,” Wen reports, gesturing to the door with his pen. “Now I will take you to my office and we will discuss. Follow me.”

Heero turns, expecting Wufei to cut across his path and put him behind, but nothing like that happens. Instead Wufei drops his chin a fraction, making some strategic retreat.

“After you,” he says.  
_____

They’re taken to some kind of board room higher in the building than they’ve been previously, and Wen indicates for them each to take a seat on the other side of the table to him. He sets the clipboard down, revealing the face of it for the first time, but it’s not informative. Wen writes in numbers only, and there’s no obvious key to their meaning.

‘Clever,’ Heero thinks, whilst Wufei ruminates on the practicality of such a system.

Wen begins, trotting out a riddle in Chinese that Heero can’t follow, but it seems that is the point. Satisfied at Heero’s lack of response, Wen switches back to English.

“The agency,” he says, “Implied you were more conversant. We also did not request two interviewees.”

“It’s a bonus,” Heero answers. “Hire one, get one free.”

“And how would that work?”

Truth be told, Heero hasn’t a clue. His whole career has come rubber-stamped with the missive ‘does not play well with others’.

“However you want it to work,” he says instead. Wufei makes a noise under his breath.

“We will be contacting the agency for an explanation,” Wen says, in a tone that makes Heero sense trouble, but then Wen waves a hand dismissively and continues. “Let’s talk about your performance today. The first test. You were asked to determine an issue of an employee. What is your conclusion? What should Mr. Shen do? Should this man be fired?”

“No,” they both say, simultaneously.

Mr. Wen makes a little expression of perhaps false interest and adds a dot to his form. “Mr. Yuy, how have you come to this conclusion?”

“His computer is operating a bug that allows him to record financial data. If you fire him, you won’t know who he’s selling it to. I’d keep him on, watch his computer with a bug of my own, and find out who my enemy was.”

He can feel Wufei’s attention glued to him as he speaks and when he concludes, Heero throws a brief challenging look at him.

“Mr. Chang?”

Wufei pauses. “I don’t think he’s a bad person,” he says. Wen sits back. Heero’s tempted to do the same.

“A bad person?”

“A bad employee,” Wufei says, a crease forming between his brows. “You need to ask him what happened to the orchid.”

“What orchid?” Heero says. Wufei looks askance at the harsh tone of voice.

“It may have been some other plant, but there was a mark on the desk where the pot would have been. He is a prize calligrapher; that suggests orchid to me.”

Mr Wen is writing dots again. “I see,” he says. Heero doesn’t.

“The office put me in mind of a careful, modest man. A long-time employee who is trusted, but who has not risen to the top so as to be inaccessible. He’s the type I would target if I were looking for a weak link. His weakness is his very loyalty.”

“All this from a mark on the desk?”

“Yes. No. Logic. If he’d grown bored of the plant or it had died, he would have replaced it the same day he took it away. I think it broke, but there’s no reasonable way to assume that he broke it. It was set far back on the desk by the window.”

“The office is on the 16th floor,” Wen reasons.

“The window opens inwards and the struts for the maintenance cage run past it. It’s accessible,” Wufei says.

“Can you prove it?”

“No,” Wufei admits. “Can you prove he installed the bug?”

Wen doesn’t smile, but his pen lingers a little when he makes his mark. “So which of you is correct?” he asks.

Heero catches his breath and finds himself saying, “Both of us. Both of us have concluded that you need more information. My approach would determine the leak. His would determine the man’s guilt. From a purely business perspective, mine has more value.”

“Mine would ensure that a valuable employee wasn’t rashly dismissed,” Wufei adds. “Or determine why his loyalty had failed. That might prevent future dissatisfaction amongst your older hires.”

“Thank you,” Wen says, with a faint smile. “You present an imaginative solution.” He lays down his pen. “Mr. Chang, given that i have no resume for you, I presently have no questions. You may leave while I continue with Mr. Yuy. You may wait outside, if you wish.”

Wufei rises and bows.

When the door is closed again, Wen pauses briefly and then asks, evidently on a tangent. “How would you appraise his performance in the dojo?”

Heero had been mentally preparing to defend the fact he was fired from his last job, and the question takes him unawares. “Well-trained.” he says. “He’s a structured, competent fighter.”

“Speak freely, Mr. Yuy. What did he do wrong?”

‘He let me punch him,’ Heero thinks, but he doesn’t go so far as to say it because instinct tells him that’s the wrong answer. “He took initiative,” Heero says instead, thinking of that first glancing blow, and the passion behind it, and then the answer lights up in his mind. Employees, of course. “But he lost his temper as soon as he was goaded and used excessive force. In a real fight, this matters less, but it was a test and he injured his opponent. Your staff. It was…” Heero gropes for the right word. “Inconsiderate.”

“Did you hold back with my staff?”

“Yes.”

“And with him?”

“I intended to,” Heero says, honestly.

Wen makes a little ‘hm’ of thought, and turns a page on his clipboard. “I would like to discuss your previous employment,” he says, smoothly changing the subject.  
___

Wufei is in another soulless lobby when Heero finally emerges. The mark on his face is settling in to bruising, though it’s not there yet. Just a dirty looking smear across his jaw. ‘It could have done with an ice pack,’ Heero thinks. Too late for that now.

Wen has dismissed him, with no real indication on how the interview went, just a general timescale of when Heero can expect to hear from them. To his mind, it didn’t go badly. He finds with these things that the tests are usually good, and the verbal interview bad, and it’s usually sheer skill that carries him into a job rather than his personality. Too good not to hire. But Wufei’s presence added something that tipped the scales a little, Heero thinks. Not entirely in his favour, but enough to make him look good.

‘Deliberately so?’ Heero wonders, relinquishing his pass to the security guards in the parking lot. He doesn’t like the idea of having been played, but he equally can’t argue that if he has, it’s been to his advantage.

‘Who the hell are you?’ Heero thinks, staring at the back of Wufei’s head. The man is too many contradictions bottled up in one person and Heero has a Maxwell-ish need to crack him open to see what he really is, even though it’s not second nature to him to be curious about people. Normally, a basic understanding feels sufficient, but Wufei presents no stable handhold to get a mental grip on and it’s enervating and annoying by turns.

But it’s not threatening. And as Wufei had put it, there’s a kind of Yes. No. Logic that makes Heero think he’s not a bad person, even if he were in any kind of position to judge.

And this is too much philosophy at the end of a long day. Heero scrapes it all to one side and takes a look at the bottom line, which is that whether he meant to or not, Wufei has been more of a help than a hindrance.

Satisfied with this final output, Heero pulls the car keys from his pocket and says, “Catch.”

Wufei moves fast and closes his hands, oyster-like, around the keys. His mouth twitches into a narrow little smile.

“Just don’t get us pulled over,” Heero adds, opening the passenger side door.

“What?”

“By the cops.”

Wufei doesn’t dignify this with an answer, already engaged in adjusting the seat and mirrors to his liking. He ignites the engine and then says, by way of order, “Seatbelt.”

“I don’t like wearing it.”

“So sad. Put it on. You’re the one who wants to avoid the cops.”

Heero clicks it in, and Wufei drives them out through the gate and onto the road, with a leashed but almost palpable glee at doing so.

They drive. Heero directs. It’s nothing crazy. They don’t go tearing off down the highway, and couldn’t anyway. They’ve rolled right out into the evening rush hour. Wufei clicks his tongue in annoyance and weaves his way along the canon of the business district between all the skyscrapers hemming the road in.

“Take a left,” Heero says. “We’ll take the old coast road. It’s faster. Most traffic is heading the other way.”

“Ahn,” Wufei says, frowning at the road. They peel out of the traffic jam into a tunnel, and Wufei breaths a noise that’s not quite a sigh but certainly related to one. His shoulders drop back a fraction, and his chest rises, but Heero can’t tell what it means, other than maybe some red alert inside the other man has scaled back to an amber.

They roll on through the tunnel. It always reminds Heero of the low-gravity area in a colony. He half expects to see grips on the wall for pulling people along, half expects the smell of the inside of a compression suit. Must be something about the way the tunnel is lit with those big round white lights. Maybe a tube is just a tube, no matter how big you make it. Then the road breaks out from the tunnel, shoots through the arms of high retaining walls and without warning they’re out into the sudden open space of the ring road by the ports.

Wufei stamps his foot down on the brake.

The car bucks and swerves into the hard shoulder, Heero braced against the door. A horn blares behind them, and then trails away.  
___

Deaf, Wufei throws himself free of the car, sucking in a cold rush of sea air. The car engine stalls dead, leaving only the tick-tick-tick of the automatic emergency warning lights. They flicker in his corner of his eyes, smears of yellow, the weird pale shape of Heero’s anger behind the windscreen, but of no consequence. His attention is stolen entirely by what is ahead.

The sea out of Chenshi harbour is gunmetal grey, cut with oscillating streaks of black and silver as it moves. Wufei is given the impression of something breathing under a cloth, but he has no presence of mind to dwell on it further. The winter sky is a dirty grey, the colour of insulation, and yellowed with age. But fluid. It moves like oily water, and that vertigo yanks at the pit of his stomach so that instinctively he grabs at the railing before it pulls him up.

A gruff voice says, “Might snow later…”

Wufei hardly hears it.

There’s a pin-prick rolling on the blanket of the waves, a white bead that rocks up and down and then shocks Wufei by suddenly making sense of itself as a great ship shrunk by distance.

Or is it a small ship?

The two images - small ship - big ship- flick back and forth in his head like a children’s toy; see the rabbit or the duck? Neither makes sense. He wants to ask ‘How big is that?’ but his throat has frozen.

Wind stings his face, needling his skin with spray. Wufei looks down and then up and then must make some noise because Heero moves into his peripheral vision again. Wrenching a hand from the bars, Wufei waves it at him in dismissal.

It’s raining. Without purpose, just a chilly spit of rain.

Wufei swallows. The clouds seem to fall towards the ocean, like there’s a hand out of sight beyond it, dragging two sheaves of silk out of a drawer, but of course, it is merely the horizon.

He’d imagined a cardboard cutout. A painting. To think it was this all along. This terrible, beautiful thing. This roaring, yawning, living expanse; this monstrous size.

A shiver runs through Wufei’s body, his eyes are parched wide open.

“Unreal, isn’t it?” Heero comments, as though from a long way away. Wufei still can’t answer. He can’t look away. There’s power in the air and water that hits something deep inside of him and drags it up, an irrational wildness. The kind that makes a man, with no reason, fling himself from a bridge.

Cold fingers close on his arm.

Wufei wrenches from the unexpected touch, the bars of the railing ringing like gongs when his knees collide with them. The cats’ eyes are wide open and bluer than the damn sky.

In the presence of a witness, the wildness snuffs out.

“I said, ‘let’s go’.”

“Go?” Wufei’s voice is not his own. He clears his throat, trying to find it.

“I need to buy dinner. There’s a barbeque place a few doors down from my apartment, if you eat meat.” Heero jerks his head towards the car. “Come on. This is boring. And it’s starting to rain.”

“I eat meat,” Wufei says, numbly.

The ground shifts under his feet like it’s made of sponge when he lets go of the rail. Heero takes the driver’s seat, and Wufei doesn’t argue, glad just to be inside. The dull interior of the car is an embrace after out there. It smells of machine and humanity, something familiar. He closes the door on himself, and the other mental ones between his seat and the one next to it only Heero circumvents it anyway by dumping his phone into Wufei’s lap.

“What?”

“Make yourself useful,” Heero says, pulling back onto the highway. The sky seethes on their whole left hand side, held at bay by only finger-thin railings. “Look up the restaurant so we can call ahead for takeout.”

“Yes,” Wufei says, staring hard at the phone. It slips in his grip a little and he stops to wipe his palm on his leg. Breathe in. Breathe out. Equalise. Control.

Clearing his throat, he asks, “What’s the address?”


	8. Same-Same but Different

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Heero and Wufei undergo a stressful evening of asking themselves 'What Would a Normal Person Do?', Wufei experiences more emotions about bathrooms than he could ever have anticipated, and everyone goes to bed with a headache.

The apartment building is familiar to Wufei in that it’s the same as every other high rise in the Earth Sphere. He imagines. It’s not as if he ever spent much time amongst the general populace. 

Heero keys them into a lobby; a stretched affair with a red runner down a faux marble floor. Chandeliers give it the air of an exotic hotel, but the effect ruined by the choice of yellowish lighting and the blare of television noise. 

An old man behind a desk, shambolic in spite of the vest and ironed shirt, greets them with a smile. He has the slur of someone with loose false teeth and the cheer of someone too old to care about the troubles of anyone young. “Eh, welcome home! You’ve got company with you, I see. Who is this?” 

Heero draws up short at the question, one eye rolling towards Wufei as if to ask ‘how the hell do I define this?’. He settles for grunting ‘friend’, Wufei presumes because ‘accidental purchase’ isn’t in his vocabulary. 

“Ah! It’s better to eat together, eh? Did you get something good to eat?” 

Heero ploughs towards the stairs, leaving Wufei caught between one social awkwardness and another. “Yes, thank you. We’re looking forward to it,” he replies, “Please excuse us.” 

“Haha, eat lots!” the old man encourages, waving him off. “It’s good to eat a lot when you can!” 

“Yes,” Wufei says, backing off and making it around the corner before scoffing. “Is that your landlord?” 

“Regrettably,” Heero replies, not looking. “What did you say to him?” The back of Heero’s head is a sudden annoyance that prompts Wufei to be mean. 

“That you were rushing upstairs because you needed to shit.” 

The toe of Heero’s shoe catches on the steps, making him stumble, and the bag of barbecue swing wildly. He regains his balance in the next step and turns slowly back to narrow his eyes at Wufei. 

“No, you didn’t,” Heero growls.

“No,” Wufei admits, smirk dropping away. The cat eyes flash and then turn away as Heero continues climbing. Wufei follows at his own pace, tucking his hands into his sleeves so as to appear unfazed but inwardly unsettled. Every floor they pass a window, and that heaving sky is still out there.

His head hurts. Inside his jacket, he slides one hand to the lining and fingers the lump secured inside the padding, but it’s hollow comfort now. 

The clatter of a door opening drags his focus back to the here and now. Fifth floor. Right at the top. 

There’s only one door, and suddenly Heero’s choices make sense to Wufei; if ever there was a man who disliked having neighbours. Personally, he considers it a relief as well. The last thing he wants is to be questioned too closely by some friendly busy-body. Not with one guarding the gates already. 

Heero flicks on the light and shuffles out of the narrow space inside the door, shoving his shoes onto a shelf. Wufei copies, stepping out of his shoes and filing them between the formal shoes and a pair of sport shoes. There aren’t any others. The addition of his slippers does nothing to make the shelf look less empty. 

He steps up into a single room, but one of generous proportions. A lounge space bleeds into a kitchen area and vanishes behind it, presumably to other rooms out of sight, but Wufei’s eye is drawn to the picture window. It frames Chengshi, the city already fading to darkness and fairy lights. 

Heero flicks on another light and stabs a button on the wall. A blind lowers, letting Wufei breathe again. 

“This is your first time off-colony?” 

“Yes.” 

“You get used to it.” 

“You’re colony-born?” The possibility had occurred to Wufei before, but he hadn’t given it any serious thought. 

“L1,” Heero says, in a tone that doesn’t encourage follow-up questions. 

Wufei doesn’t pry. With nothing to do and no familiarity with the place, he stands roughly halfway between the kitchen and living area and makes his observations. The apartment suggests money, but the contents suggest otherwise. There’s bare space everywhere, though the arrangement doesn’t suggest aesthetic minimalism.

“You’re new here?” Wufei surmises. It’s the only answer for the disparity between the man and the habitation. 

Heero grunts by way of affirmation. The lack of Mandarin makes more sense in that case. Then again, Wufei considers, the man isn’t much of a conversationalist in English either. 

Truth be told, neither is Wufei. Small talk dies between them, and with little to look at, Wufei’s energy flags and he has to fight harder not to slump into the aches in his body. He wouldn’t be surprised if the straps on the freight have bruised him. The punch certainly has. 

At the restaurant, Wufei had opted to glean a moment of privacy and remained in the car while Heero ordered. Now this strikes him as a mistake. By not keeping involved with the proceeds of the evening, he’s been excluded, and it galls him to be left to stand by the door like a piece of baggage. He understands that they’ve gone beyond the realms of normal hospitality, but he counts this as a lack of even basic consideration.

Heero’s pocket buzzes and he stops decanting food from the bag to take out his phone. Must be important, because he looks annoyed but disinclined to ignore it. 

“Finish with this,” he orders, stepping away from the kitchen. He walks straight passed Wufei, answering the call with a curt, “Yuy speaking,” and then closes a door out of sight on the conversation. 

“Finish with this?” Wufei repeats aloud. What’s that supposed to mean? Eat it? Wufei has half a mind to do just that. The smell of meat and oil has roused hunger to overtake tiredness, but it runs into the wall of his pride and stops him. He’s not going to be caught standing at the counter, choking back food like a dog in breach of Heero’s hospitality. 

Even if Heero has no damn concept of hospitality himself. 

Wufei dumps the remaining containers out of the carrier bag onto the counter and picks through them, creating a line of of mains and sides. What next? There should be something to eat it from, and eat it with. Wufei pokes around the kitchen drawers and cabinets, finding minimal items within. The first he opens contains nothing but a roll of plastic and a carton of powder which upon inspection is something to do with laundry. The next contains a tall bucket that Wufei presumes must be for waste. The third has a heavy door, and is mechanically chilled. It contains nothing but bottles.

Wufei wonders at that. Is there a communal kitchen somewhere else, like a Clan house, and this just a private luxury? Or is it really just a kitchen for a single person, and Heero doesn’t even bother to use it. Domestics are the kind of knowledge Wufei has never had to pay much attention to before. Housing and food just happen, and although he understands the process of agriculture, the minor details of farm to plate were on a page that he never bothered to turn over. 

He turns the bottles over instead. There’s water, some kind of health drink and alcohol in approximately equal measure. He pulls out a bottle of water cautiously and sets it on the counter.

Wufei is about to choose his next target when Heero returns, bad tempered. His ire isn’t much improved to see how little progress Wufei has made. Wordlessly he pushes past and opens a cupboard, pulling out bowls and glasses. 

“I didn’t know where you kept them,” Wufei says. 

Heero just takes the bowls to the counter and begins tipping the takeaway into them. Then spotting Wufei lingering, rolls his eyes and picks up the glasses. 

“Put these on the table.” 

The tone is as bad as the back of Heero’s head. 

“I’m not your servant,” Wufei snaps. 

Heero blinks and then simply opens his fingers. The glasses drop. Instinctively, Wufei lashes out to catch them. 

They drop into each palm almost silently, leaving Wufei jarred. 

“Oh. They don’t fly?” Heero remarks, and then turns his back to empty out the containers from the restaurant. Dumbfounded, Wufei turns and places them on the table. 

His surprise is quickly smothered by outrage. ‘How dare he?’ Wufei thinks, and then a cold wash of realisation hits home hard. 

Of course he dares. 

This is not L5. 

‘He doesn’t know the first thing about who I am.’ 

Heero methodically pushes items across the counter to within his reach and Wufei collects them and arranges the table in a silent daze. 

‘And he’s dares, because who am I now?” 

Not Long Wufei. Not the heir. He has no reputation as a warrior here, and perhaps never will, as in this era they only have security on Earth, not war. Even Chang Wufei doesn’t mean much, Wufei realises with mounting shame. Who is he? The last member of a sub-family with a ruined hall not fit for the meanest worker to live in. The would-be leader of a single rotting tube in a backwater cluster that no one cares about.

Mockery aside, take all that away and there’s not much left. 

Just four limbs and his wits. Enough?

Some part of him had expected Earth to be the same. That he would be the same, just less constrained, but the truth is that entering Earth’s atmosphere has stripped him of everything. His posturing embarrasses him. How can he throw his weight around before someone who has gone to such lengths on his behalf? In a place where his social rank may as well be no better than Heero Yuy’s servant. 

“Sit,” Heero says. He passes Wufei a bowl heaped with food, which Wufei accepts in both hands. He bows slightly and murmurs, ‘thank you’ by way of apology. 

The cats’ eyes glance at him curiously. Heero picks up the bottle and cracks the seal.

“Water?”

He doesn’t actually wait for Wufei’s agreement, though he nods, and just pours a full glass. Taking it, Wufei tries not to guzzle. The water tastes empty and sweet - so much so he checks the label to see if it’s flavoured, and then finishes it too soon in several long pulls. 

“Thirsty?” 

Wufei nods again. Under the table, he pinches the skin of his knuckle and it sits there, sticking up like a piece of clay. Dehydrated. Probably just as well, given how little opportunity he’s had to pee in the last twelve hours. 

“Drink then,” Heero says, matter of fact, pouring out a second glass.

Wufei goes through the second glass more slowly, and comments, afterwards, “You don’t have many people visit you, do you?” 

“Not here. In the past,” Heero says. “Not the kind of people who stand on ceremony.” 

Wufei shuts his mouth, feeling the sting of the reprimand, and eats. His appetite is dulled after the flare of first seeing the food, suppressed by bitter feeling and exhaustion. The food is fine, he thinks, but afterwards he would not be able to recall what he ate. But the reprimand has perhaps gone both ways. With burgeoning hospitality, Heero splits the food between them. It’s not delicate serving, but Wufei will take the olive branch no matter how clumsily offered. He has no recourse to refuse. 

Setting down his chopsticks, Heero rises. He rattles in the fridge and returns with an open bottle that oozes condensation onto the table when he sets it down with two smaller glasses.

“You can drink?” Heero asks. 

“Yes,” Wufei replies, because Heero is itching to pour. 

The liquor is smooth and tastes of little beyond the high fire of the alcohol in it. They nip the glasses back in a mouthful or two and Heero pours again. Wufei notes the change in Heero’s attitude as he finishes his meal. A gleam of satisfaction comes across him, and although he eats methodically through his share, his attention is more on the glass than the dishes. 

‘So that’s it,’ Wufei thinks. There had to be something.

“I’m going to the agency office tomorrow morning,” Heero announces, at the end of the meal, scraping the last mouthful from his bowl. “You’ll stay here.” 

“Understood.” 

This decided, Heero stacks the dishes on the table, pushing half towards Wufei and rises. “You can rest. We’ll discuss what needs to be done when I return. Leave that,” he adds, when Wufei reaches to pick up the liquor bottle. 

They cart the empty dishes into the kitchen where Heero pushes a cloth into Wufei’s hands and plunges his own hands into the sink that he fills recklessly with water and soap. Wufei wonders again if Heero really is rich. On waste-leery L5, even the upper eschlon are fine-tuned to how much of a resource is required for a purpose, but Heero bullies the dishes into cleanliness, running the tap whenever he wants. 

Wufei dries, wary of breaking anything although the dinnerware is hardly refined. ‘Mine were nicer,’ he thinks before he can stop himself, and then berates himself for being so petty. As if agreeing that he needs punishment, the building growls. Wufei freezes. 

Heero looks up.

“It’s just thunder,” he says.

“I know,” Wufei says shortly, forcing the cloth into a glass and twisting it hard. 

Heero pauses. “If you want to see it, the controls are next to the window.”

“It’s just weather,” Wufei echoes, keeping his back to it. Sweat prickles down the nape of his neck and his head pounds. The thunder rolls again, like an angry hand on sheet metal. 

Heero drains the sink and wipes his hands dry on the end of the cloth, leaving Wufei to finish the chore. “Do you remember where the bowls are kept?” 

“Yes.” 

“Did you want anything else to eat?” 

“No. Thank you.” 

“There are protein bars in that drawer if you’re hungry later,” Heero says, “I intend to be back before noon tomorrow. I’ll bring food on my return.” 

Wufei bites his tongue and pushes the dishes into the cupboard, any shred of enthusiasm he had for breakfast dying.

Heero doesn’t notice. He’s returned to the table and poured another measure of the liquor, and then turned his attention to a cabinet. Opening it, he drags out a box, still done up with packing tape, which he slits open with a thumbnail. 

“Washkit,” he announces, tossing Wufei a slim black case. “It’s a spare, you can have it. Do you need other clothes?”

“No,” Wufei says. He has no intention of removing his jacket until he’s fully alone - the promise of a morning to his own devices is a relief in that respect. And anyway, Heero’s apartment is cold. The thunder growls past the windows again, throwing out a search beam ahead of it’s progress and rattling at the windows. 

“Do you want another drink?” 

Wufei nods assent, because what else is there to do? He takes the glass and they return to the table. Rather than attempt conversation, Wufei goes through the contents of the kit. It’s basic enough - razor, comb, mirror, soap, toothbrush, deodorant, sun cream and bug spray. The last two are curios to him. Heero watches him repack it. 

“How old are you?” he asks. 

“Is that important?” 

“I’m bad with faces. I can’t tell. I think you’re younger than me, or the same.” 

Wufei sips at the drink, and then tells him. 

“Hm,” Heero says. “Same.” 

“Where’s the bathroom?” Wufei asks, prickling under the scrutiny. Heero points to the appendix that disappears around the end of the kitchen area. 

“Second door.” 

The space behind the kitchen is only a nub of corridor, which in other hands might have been cheered up with some art, but the walls are completely blank. The first door is firmly shut, the second ajar. Wufei closes it behind him and feels for the light pull. 

The lights clink like teacups as they turn on, flickering as one by one the bars engage, leaving Wufei facing himself in a full-length mirror he is certain that Heero cannot have chosen. Against all the white tile, Wufei reflects that he’s looked better, and then he locks the door. 

The sound of the metal is like dropping a heavy load. Wufei leans against the door for a moment, eyes closed, feeling for the stillness of the ground beneath his feet. It’s harder to reach than usual, maybe because the sky is still at war with itself, but in due time he opens his eyes again, blinks the grit from them and focuses. 

Upon inspection, the bathroom is eerie. At first glance, it’s just a bathroom, and then he begins to attend to the differences - everything’s in ones. There’s no actual bath, just a wash closet with a single jet protruding from the wall, which looks very basic to Wufei’s eye. There’s a single tap at the sink, and a single window frosted over with bobbly glass for privacy, but of his most immediate concern is that there’s only a water toilet. 

He presses a foot to the pedal bin and peers into its empty belly before deciding that this can’t possibly be the alternative, and then stares again at the toilet. 

The top of the cistern lifts off, revealing a tank of water and a simple mechanical array with a balloon, which when pressed, starts more water flowing into the tank. Feeling foolish, Wufei replaces it. 

Of course. Earth. 

Why would they bother to separate out solid waste when they have all the resources they could want?

Doing both deeds in one pan goes against his most ingrained principles, as much as if someone had told him to do it in the middle of the floor. But need forces the hand of morals to win out, but even then he has a moment of doubt before shoving the handle on the tank to use all that water for such a purpose. 

And for a brief moment, he hates Earth and its careless extravagance. 

His temper is not improved when he squirts cleanser from the bottle on the sink, only to find that it gums up his hands. It too requires water, and makes a horrid quantity of foam before he’s free of it. 

The experience is another knock. If even using the restroom isn’t straight-forward, then he has no reason to hope that anything else will go well for him either. 

In the end, he’s wary of Heero thinking that he’s hiding in the bathroom, and so emerges again. He needn’t have worried. Heero is still at the table, now with a laptop, plugging away at something as if he’s forgotten Wufei is there. 

Or not quite forgotten. As Wufei approaches, Heero spots him and lifts the bottle to pour.

“No,” Wufei says, quickly pressing his palm to the lips of the glass. “I cleaned my teeth.” 

Heero returns the bottle to the table. “…Did you want to sleep?” he hazards after another pause. 

“I can wait if needs be.” 

Heero doesn’t take his word for it, standing and folding the laptop under one arm, the bottle and the glass pinched in the fingers of the other hand. 

“The sheets on the bed have been used and I don’t own spares,” Heero says. “Can you sleep on the sofa? It’s not uncomfortable.” 

“I don’t care,” Wufei says, with a touch too much honesty. He wants nothing more than privacy, but at the same time, not to be left alone with this sense of smallness. He’ll settle for Heero going as far as the next room. 

“I’ll bring a blanket.” 

Heero walks off into the bedroom, and returns a moment later with another packet filched or purchased from some army store somewhere. It contains a blanket sure enough; silver foil on one side and cheap fleece on the other. 

“That’s the only spare I have.” 

“This is fine.” It isn’t. It crinkles when Wufei unfolds it, and remains stubbornly in its creases when spread on the sofa. It’s going to be like trying to sleep inside a ration pack. 

“All right,” Heero says, “Do you need anything else?” 

“No,” Wufei says, without thinking about it.

“Then I’ll be in my room. Good night.” 

“Good night,” Wufei says, taken aback, and then Heero’s bedroom door shuts, and he has all the solitude he can handle. 

“Asshole,” Wufei mutters to himself and glares at the sofa. 

Outside the storm bangs rain at the windows, the pulse of it like a strobe through Wufei’s temples. Fuck it. Fuck the lot of it. He stabs the lights off with a finger and puts himself to bed on the sofa, dragging the stupid little blanket over him and clenching his jaw against the world. 

Fuck Earth. Fuck its weather. And fuck the whole of today. There’s a triple concept to mediate on, that’s for sure. 

Stretched like a board, Wufei closes his ears to the storm, shuts his eyes and concentrates on oozing anger from every pore until either it’s drained away or the storm shuts up. 

And as if it can hear him, the wind tosses another slap of rain against the glass out of contempt. 

___

There’s little on the internet about the L5 colonies. Heero’s unclear if that’s because the information is suppressed or just that nobody knows, or that nobody has any interest in recording what is known for the inquiring public. 

He suspects the former, but even delving into some less common areas of the web, he doesn’t turn up much. Some details of the original annexation of the Long Clan and their exile from China in the early years of space colonisation, which was centuries ago. Long enough not have only and indirect bearing on the man in his apartment, anyway. 

They’re Chinese, the information concludes, they’re politically volatile for reasons no one gives a shit about any more, and they’ve been in space about as long as anyone. What more could you care to know? 

Heero would like to know what Wufei is running from. He’s not a coward, and he’s not weak-willed either; so what’s he doing here? 

‘Something forced him out, or there’s something important he can only achieve on Earth.’ 

Heero stops searching and thinks for a moment. There’s a strong chance that the agency are pissed as hell with him for turning up with a stranger to Mr. Shen’s interview. There’s a slimmer chance that they impressed the hell out of Mr. Shen anyway with their stunts. Could go either way. 

Likewise, he may come back to the apartment tomorrow to find it empty, and in this way, the matter resolved. 

‘He was set on paying me back,’ Heero thinks. ‘Maybe I should let him.’ 

He tilts his glass and finds both it and the bottle empty, and toys with the idea of getting another. There’s that whisky in the living room cabinet. 

Only Wufei is in there. 

Heero rolls the glass in his palms and then accesses his remote programme and pulls up the security feed of the flat. The bugs are only semi-decent ones; video in black and white, no audio, and they feed back a grainy image, but they can see in the dark and he only needs a few to eliminate blind spots. 

Wufei is stretched out on the sofa, his head poking out of the blanket like somebody’s leftovers, the rest of his body stiff. It doesn’t look natural. It definitely doesn’t look like sleep, though Wufei has his eyes shut. 

‘Weird,’ thinks Heero, despite having been a big dose of weird his whole life. 

He’s not tempted by the idea of stepping into the living room and have Wufei rear up from the sofa like Nosferatu, however, so he kills the feed, ditches the glass and rolls into the blankets of his bed. 

Then with the ease of a lifetime’s practice in compartmentalisation, Heero pushes all his thoughts into a mental bucket marked ‘tomorrow’s problem’, and drifts at once into a catnap.


	9. Rain

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Wufei occupies the flat for a morning, intercepts a phone call, is bothered by water, and learns a few things about his host.

Heero rouses moments before the alarm, pressing the button before it buzzes. He turns out of bed and listens to the silence of the flat. No noise. Only the hiss of the early morning traffic, already building up on the road below them. Heero twitches up the blind and looks out on a grey morning.

The storm passed further inland some time in the early hours, bringing on its heels a thick swathe of cloud that fogs out the skyscrapers. Heero stretches and scratches, under a fog of his own. He slinks out of his bedroom as quietly as he knows how - the living room is a cave, inhabited by the unknown quantity of the man from L5 - and into the bathroom.

He skips his usual routine. No time for exercise, though he stretches again in the shower, easing the aches of yesterday’s exertion.

‘You fight like someone glued your feet to the floor,’ Wufei had said, like he knew. Not even Duo gives Heero constructive criticism about fighting. Only Trowa still does that, and usually the same well-worn exasperation: ‘Why didn’t you dodge?’.

Towelling off, Heero resolves to get Wufei back on a dojo mat tomorrow. If he’s still there. Heero stops and listens again, but nothing.

Once dressed, Heero fills his bag with everything he doesn’t want pried into (precious little - laptop, phone, a hard drive; he has no mementoes to leave lying around) and goes to see if Wufei has woken up as Scylla or Charybdis in the inlet between the one end of the apartment and the other.

Neither, as it happens. He’s still asleep.

Not the uncanny posture of before, a real sleep. Heero recognises it. It’s the type of sleep  defined by adrenaline giving up and the body shutting down. No wonder. Between his arrival and inviting himself to the Shen interview, yesterday had been a long haul by most people’s standards, and Heero has no idea how long Wufei was moving before he broke the atmosphere. Maybe days. Peering through the gloom, Heero notes that the man’s face has come up in a bruise. The line of his jaw is puffy and yellowing, and he frowns as if he wants to reproach Heero for it. Heero considers he has nothing to apologise for. Wufei was the one who put his face in the way of the fist.

And he didn’t ask for any sympathy about it. Not the way Duo would have. Duo would have bitched all evening, even if Heero had nothing to do with it.

But Wufei takes ownership of his hardships.

The blanket is kicked off onto the floor, leaving Wufei a pale smear against the darker fabric of the couch. He’s turned in his sleep, facing outward into the room, and must have gotten cold because his arms are half in each opposite sleeve like he’s cradling something, and he’s pushed his feet into the crack in the cushions.  

The obvious kindness is to toss the blanket back over him, but Heero doesn’t trust Wufei’s exhaustion enough to risk it. Getting caught in the act would be excruciating, and besides, Heero has the sense Wufei wouldn’t thank him for it in any case. Heero wouldn’t thank himself either - to wake in a stranger’s house and find that they’d invaded his space without him knowing strikes him as a violation of trust. As a compromise, he pads awkwardly back to the bathroom and reboots the heating system.

When he leaves, he cuts through the kitchen, pulling a handful of protein bars from the drawer and leaving two on the counter, and doesn’t stop to disturb things further.

Outside he slings his bag into the car and plots his course. The Agency, the corner store - no, better the supermarket; it has more goods. ‘And then,’ Heero thinks grimly, starting the engine, ‘I’d better start job hunting again.’

___

The shutting of the front door wakes him, without Wufei knowing what the noise is or where it’s come from. Once awake, he knows he won’t sleep again, but he finds actually rising to be sluggish work.  
   
The mild ache of yesterday has reinvented itself as soreness in his back and shoulders. Arching, Wufei pops the joints of his vertebrae and then still half-asleep falls into the familiar repetition of forms; slow today. Forms for equilibrium not training, breathe, stretch, pivot, balance, until his head feels clearer and the loudest complaints in his body aren’t pain.

It’s still dark.

From outside the muffled noise of the city seeps through. Car doors and engines. Nobody’s yelling. Maybe they don’t care.

He presses the button by the picture window and the blind glides upwards. Chengshi beyond is gone. ‘What happened? A fire?’ Wufei wonders and then he realises he’s looking at cloud. Up close it’s not as interesting as he’d expected, more like steam than anything else.

It’s strangely calming. All that blank white moisture..  

But speaking of humidity - Wufei plucks at his jacket, feeling crumpled and unwashed. He’d been crumpled and unwashed yesterday, but it’s worse first thing in the morning somehow.

“Now,” he says aloud to himself. Regroup. Eat. Drink. Wash. Plan. He may not be going out anywhere yet but he has plenty to get on with this morning. Finding the protein bars, he eats both with disapproval. Heero’s lifestyle is atrocious, Wufei decides. It’s clean enough, but it’s not functional and a long way from civilised. Throwing a cupboard shut with a bang, Wufei asks the apartment, “What kind of barbarian doesn’t have tea?”

In a fit of pique, he pits himself against the obscurity of the appliances and the mug of boiled water he produces feels like his first real victory.

“You wait,” he tells the saucepans with a sneer, “Do you think I can’t learn?”

But he’s wasting time. Heero will be back in a matter of hours.

Taking the washkit to the bathroom, Wufei discovers that Heero’s bedroom door is open. Inside is a room that is completely anonymous. The bed is made with tight corners, the top of bedside table is barren. There’s nothing.

Perturbed, Wufei shuts himself in the bathroom, keeping to one task at a time. There he finds that there’s a generously heated fixture on the wall (because of course it is), of no obvious use except what he has in mind. Wufei drops the washkit on the windowsill and sets to work.

He puts aside his distaste for wasting water and helps himself to as much as he wants. There’s no evidence of any limit to how much will come out of the tap, and he strips, tossing everything except the jacket into the sink and thumps the dirt out with vigour, which turns out to be a great mood improver.

It makes him realise why the laundry women sing. But he can’t hold a tune and isn’t prone to bursts of whimsy of that kind either, so he finishes with only a grim satisfaction of having worked something else out for himself. The thought ‘I washed my own clothes’ is so basic, but new.

“There’s the lesson,” Wufei chides himself. “Stop fussing about what is different. Look at how it is new.”  
   
He wrings his clothes out and drapes them on the heated wall device. The fabric is thin enough that it should be at damp at most by the time Heero gets back. Good enough to last until he can buy something else.

‘Something more in style,’ Wufei thinks suddenly, rubbing drywash from the kit into his skin. ‘But what?’ Heero had a western suit, and so did Wen, but their dogs in the dojo had loose clothes more like pyjamas, and the old man in the lobby had some kind of sleeveless jacket on.

‘I’ll have to look,’ Wufei decides, stepping into the wash closet and undoes half of his good temper by pressing the start button. The jet shakes and coughs a gout of water right into his unsuspecting face, making him yell. Staggering he jabs his thumb into the button again and stands there, wiping his eyes and yelling.  

Water.

Of course it’s fucking water.

Why the fuck did he assume it was an air shower when everything else in this fucking room is designed to erupt water at the slightest provocation? Stupid!  

With a healthier respect for what it does, Wufei pushes the button again.

It rains.

Wufei turns his hand under it, and as if by magic, the water grows warmer. The Long Hall has a communal bath, a huge luxury for a family home, but although most of the older houses have the infrastructure for private baths, it’s now reserved for special occasions. Weddings, funerals. Births. Even that is nothing like this. Baths are about purity and relaxation. This is invigorating.

In the days of distant fable, wise men and great warriors stood beneath waterfalls to strengthen their muscles and focus their minds. The shower doesn’t thud out enough water for that, but it’s enough to gain an understanding of why they would have done it.

There’s no hiding from water. It’s contradictory. It drums a shallow rhythm on his head and needles at his shoulders, but whilst the rush of it seeps through his hair to his scalp in moments, the water slinks downwards slowly, around the shells of his ears and in them, softer than fingertips. The sensation of it sliding down his sternum makes the hairs on his arms shiver upright.

The fatigue rinses away. The water is gentler than the blast of an air shower, and he rubs at his skin, marvelling at how the texture of it seems to change. When was the last time he was immersed in water? He can’t remember. On L5, it’s something to joke about. The old people laugh through their teeth and point at the younger generations, saying they only know three baths in their life - the womb, a wedding and the final wash.

The soap in the dish is tacky though, Wufei realises. Heero must use this thing most days.

With mixed feelings, he turns off the jet, and steps out dripping onto the floor. His feet squeak on the tiles, which are chilly in contrast to the warm plastic.

Now what?

Wufei guiltily strigils water off of his body with the blade of his hand onto the floor before he rummages in the cabinets. Predictably, they are empty of everything except another army-issue shaving kit. Wufei’s beginning to pick up on a theme here.

With his own clothes still steaming on the heating unit, and his temper not greatly improved, Wufei steps out of the bathroom with less respect for the boundaries between host and guest, and finds that while he was showering, it started raining outside too. Chengshi has emerged behind a soft blur of water, the red lights of the skyscrapers wavering like goldfish fry. The water streaks down the window, leaving beads behind. The sight of it throws him once more into a new emotion.

It’s so beautiful.

Dragging his eyes from it, Wufei slinks into Heero’s room. There are signs of life, after all. There’s a ring mark from a glass on the side table and although the offering is minimal, there are items inside the storage units. He finds Heero’s suit from yesterday hung up inside a bag, and then better still, a drawer of folded clothes.

Heero and he are not a dissimilar size, at least. The shirt is a little loose on him, the bottoms snug around the middle - unless that’s by design? Wufei can’t tell. The fabric is clingy against his damp skin, but it’s a shortcut to warmth and modesty. It will do.

Wufei adds it to his growing list of infringements to make good later.

The rain hasn’t slowed down. From Heero’s skinny little bed, he can just make out the cars in the street creeping by in streaks of red and yellow. It’s brighter on this side of the apartment. Somewhere behind the clouds, the sun must be shining.     

Wufei sinks to the edge of the bed and drinks it in. It’s crazy that he’s read poetry about rain and now that he can see it, none of it makes sense. How can all those people call it sad when it’s beautiful?

At home they had a rain system, but like the baths, it hasn’t been used since Wufei was very small and even then only at times of celebration. Dragons bring rain. Rain means life. He remembers being held under the arms and reaching out into the water from a warm lap, the hands against his chest giving him sense of security.

In the here and now, Wufei touches the glass, and the poetry begins to make sense again. Chengshi is subdued behind the silvery drops, like it’s mourning something too.  

‘But I must keep moving forward.’

His hair trickling down his collar, Wufei goes to collect his jacket and rummage for the items he needs. The razor is simple enough, and he finds a medical kit with needles. He folds himself crosslegged on Heero’s bed, props his glasses on his nose and sets to work with a frown.

The light is better here, but the stitching is very tight and fine. He pores over the seam, unwilling to hack the silk if he doesn’t have to.

He unpicks the seam a little at a time between the padded lining and the silk, using the blunt end of the needle to wiggle the thread free. After all, he hasn’t any more. But he only needs a few inches, and once incised, he can wiggle a finger into the padding and work it free.The bag slips into his hand and he’s surprised to learn that it’s petal pink, and embroidered with grasses.

Wufei’s throat tightens, and for a long moment he can only hold it in his hands.

Inside it is a tight twist of paper, which he can’t bring himself to open, and his mother’s lost jade. These he can somewhat recall. There were photographs, and he remembers the necklace being plucked from his mouth as a baby and being scolded.

Such as she ever could scold.

But the chain has tangled with the earrings and it takes him a while to unknot it, and then he has them on his knee, and it’s a joy to see them again. Holding the pendant to the light, it sings with colour - the bright, unabashed green of imperial jade. The diamonds blink rainbows from the slim bar that connects the pi to the chain. The earrings are also jade, on long chains. Each one is simple in its elegance. The necklace is the same circumference as his thumb when touching the tip of his forefinger. The ring of jade is carved to resemble a peony with its centre missing, and the earrings form those same flowers in a slightly whiter jade. They are worth less than the pendant, though possibly not by much.

But to Wufei they’re just rocks compared to that little piece of embroidery. That twist of paper.

Wufei packs the earrings away with it, and threads the strings of the bag onto the necklace and secures it around his neck. Under the jacket, it won’t be visible. The slight weight of the bag pulls the chain taut against the nape of his neck and the silk ghosts across his chest. Wufei presses one hand over it, and wishes he had a better way of honouring them than silence and the sound of rain.

____

Wufei startles awake at the shrilling of the comms. He’s on his feet before he’s thought about it and the room lurches. Heero’s pillow is dented with the wet imprint of his head. Wufei scrubs at his face and neck, his hair dried like algae against his skin.

The coms panel, when he finds it, is on the cabinet intended to hold a TV. The caller has yet to hang up and Wufei entertains the idea that it might be Heero, but before he can decide on risking answering it or not, the machine goes silent. A little red light appears, so perhaps they’ve left a message.

Wufei stretches, feeling better than he had first thing that morning. The bag sways against his skin as he moves and this cheers him as well. Rather less cheering is the rather blatant use he’s made of Heero’s bed. He brushes at the pillow and knocks it back into shape but it’s still soggy. Wufei flips it over and trusts that it will dry before Heero notices.

The apartment is warm enough. The rack in the bathroom is still churning out heat and his clothes have gone crisp where he’d hung them. He redresses, folding up the borrowed garments and leaving them by the sink - he can own up to some of his trespasses - before turning his attention to the needles and the jacket.

It’s nearing noon. Wufei sips another cup of hot water as he works and swears over the curved sutra needle. Sewing is hardly his forte in ideal circumstances, and the thread is an irritating wiggle that won’t cooperate.

But his mother sewed this jacket and he’s damned if he’s going to do a slapdash job of mending it.

He follows the pockmarks from the previous seam, one tense run of thread at a time, and he’s beginning to make good progress when the phone rings again.

The sound bursts through his concentration like a stone lobbed though a window, and he drives the needle into his thumb in error. It gouges through his flesh like a hot knife through fat, and a bead of blood immediately wells up and blots onto the silk.

Wufei utters something foul, shaking more drops onto Heero’s carpet.

This caller; however, isn’t giving up. Wufei can tell because the ringing stops, silence prevails for a hot second, and then the comms shrieks again. It does this the whole time he takes to extract the needle from his person and find a wipe from the medkit to mop at the ensuing mess.

Stop. Ring. Stop. Ring. Ring. Ring.

Wufei gives a roar of displeasure and stabs the ‘receive’ button with his unwounded thumb.

“He’s not home,” he snaps.

The other party’s taken a deep breath to launch into some speak, but stops at this greeting, and stares. It’s a man, but Wufei doesn’t really give a shit who it is. He winds the wipe around his thumb and presses it to his other palm, concerned that if he doesn’t work out how to remove blood from silk fast, it will stain.

“Uhhh,” says the man. “Ok?”

“I can take a message,” Wufei replies, picking the needle from the floor and inspecting the thread. Fortunately it appears to be unsullied. “Seeing as it so evidently cannot wait.”

“Ohh…” the other guy says slowly, tilting his head. “This is Heero’s place?”

“He’s out. Work,” Wufei says and then adds, in a mutter, “Or something…”

To his surprise, the other man laughs. He’s leaning into his comm with roving eyes.

“Just making a social call; checking he wasn’t toes up or anything. Bet you can figure, Heero doesn’t tend to pick up unless I make it real obvious I’m not gonna quit bugging him. He’s not big on chit-chat.”

“A social call? Is that all?”

The blot is right over the seam, which is something. Wufei hopes that if it does stain then closing the seam properly will hide the worst of it, but he’d wanted to have it repaired before Heero returned to avoid getting embroiled in a discussion about the jacket, or his mother, or any of that troubled history.

“Yup. But guess he’s been busy socialising without me,” the other man surmises, with a tone and an assuming look that nettle Wufei.

“Well, he’s not here,” he retorts, knowing that it sounds pissy.

“I can see that!” The man laughs again. “How’s he doing though? What’s the gossip?”

Wufei bridles on Heero’s behalf. The one thing he is certain that they have in common is a need for personal privacy, and there’s been a small measure of trust built on that basis. But even if there weren’t, Wufei finds the question offensive.

“Ask Heero. He’ll tell you anything he cares to say by himself.”

“Oof, I was just askin’. Who are you when it comes to anybody anyway? Youre one hell of a funny-looking burglar.”

“His fiancé,” Wufei says in a final fit of pique, and he smacks the ‘end call’ button hard. The screen goes blank faster than he can have second thoughts. “Rude!” Wufei accuses the comms, but all it shows is his own watery reflection.

Peeling the wipe from his thumb, there’s nothing there of course, except an innocent looking scratch.  
_____

The footsteps coming up to the stairs are heavy, one after the other. The sound is muffled through the wall but in the dead silence, Wufei can hear them and stops to listen. They don’t stop at the landing of the 5th floor and so he rises from the sofa and goes to open the front door.

Heero looks up as he does so, key in hand.

“You were waiting?” he says, as though the idea had never occurred to him until that second.

He is laden with two large bags, one paper, one plastic, both curious.

“I heard you coming. You said noon,” Wufei replies, with a certain held-back reproach. It’s nearly two o’clock, but Heero explains himself by pushing one of the bags at him.

“I got this for you.”

Wufei backs out of the entrance with it to give Heero space to toe off his shoes. It’s the larger, paper bag. It crinkles in his grasp and the contents are soft.

“That wasn’t necessary,” Wufei says, looking inside the bag. It contains a wad of grey fluff, under which the edge of a white towel is visible. Wufei’s doing a poor job of saying ‘thank you’, but he finds himself blundering ahead and saying, “I have money now.”

Heero’s head jerks towards him.

“That is, I can get access to some,” Wufei amends. Heero’s face is a touch out of focus. Wufei takes his glasses off, and Heero gives him another of those flick-up-flick-down two second appraisals.  

“It’s just a spare blanket,” Heero says. “As you can tell, I run the Ritz here.”

Wufei’s understanding falters. The name rings a bell, but with the same muddiness of a forgotten neighbour’s relative. “The Ritz?”

“A fancy hotel.”

“Oh. Well, I could tell that by the breakfast offer.”

Sudden amusement pulls at the corner of Heero’s mouth. “I can’t cook.”

“That makes two of us,” Wufei replies, and just like that there’s a warmth between them. Heero pulls out a takeaway carton from the other bag and waggles it before placing it on the table.

Wufei leaves the big bag on the sofa and comes over to help. “How was your work?” he asks, and the politeness of the question plucks a strange note in the conversation. Too normal.

Heero goes, if possible, quieter, one finger tapping on the tabletop.

“It didn’t go well,” Wufei surmises.

Heero pauses and then seems to reset. “You’re astute. No. It didn’t. I was fired.”

Wufei stops opening the food to assess him in detail. Heero fetches glasses and chopsticks, very routine. “This doesn’t trouble you,” Wufei says, at length.

“No,” Heero agrees, pulling out a chair. “It doesn’t. I don’t like working for other people any more.”

“Then why apply to an agency?” Wufei takes the seat opposite.

“Need the money.”

“I don’t understand that reasoning. You don’t appear to be concerned about money in any other ways,” Wufei’s eyes flit towards the bag on the sofa. True, it’s nothing extortionate, but it’s the latest in a growing parade of evidence of Heero’s generosity.  “Do you have money, or don’t you?”

“I have two types of money,” Heero says. He tips out another bottle of water from the fridge and slides Wufei a glassfull across the table. “I have money that I don’t want, and I’d do about anything to be rid of it. And I have money that I don’t care about, but it’s not enough to pay for the things I need to live. Though those aren’t much…”

“Not the Ritz,” Wufei says, and there’s that tug again. They scrape out the carton onto two plates in a silence that grows more comfortable the longer it is maintained.

Wufei’s appetite is back with a vengeance, and the heat from the noodles makes his nose stream. Heero wordlessly pushes napkins towards him. Wufei wordlessly pushes the chilli oil back as Heero prises the lid from the dumplings.

The smell of the food pervades the apartment, making it all the more lived in. Heero’s hair dries in disarray, cow licked up at the back, which Wufei only sees when he stoops halfway through a mouthful to tug his sock up.

“It’s still raining.”

“Set in for the day,” Heero agrees. “Maybe even tomorrow.” He stops chewing for a moment and then adds, “You need a better coat than that. Something waterproof.”

“You didn’t take one.”

“I keep an umbrella in the car.”

“Like a parasol?”

“No, an umbrella. Doesn’t it rain on your colony?”

“Almost never,” Wufei tells him, enjoying the way Heero absorbs that information, filing it away with a ‘huh’.

“We rely on piped water from the plant.”

“Probably more efficient. Rain never makes anyone happy. I don’t understand why they go to the expense of simulating it on colonies.”

“Atmosphere,” Wufei says, looking out the window. “Having watched it all morning, I think rain reminds us of something ancient. There’s a little part in our brains that’s still in a cave.”

“Having been in the city all morning, I can tell you there are people whose brains are all still caveman,” Heero says.

“People are people,” Wufei agrees.

Heero tosses the last dumpling onto Wufei’s plate. “Eat that. I have a request.”

Wufei falters, the two parts of the sentence having so little to do with one another that he can’t keep up. He presumes that it’s no request related to dumplings.

“What is it?”

“I need to practise speaking Mandarin. Or New Asiatic. Either. I know enough Mandarin to navigate daily life but not to communicate well. Seeing as I live here, that’s a problem.”

“I’d noticed.”

“I tried to employ a tutor,” Heero says, “But my New Asiatic is so bad that I ended up with you.”

Wufei waits for it to be a joke, and then when it becomes clear that Heero is actually serious, it’s that much funnier. He chokes back the laugh, but after the rollercoaster of the last few days, the news that he’s escaped Master Long by sheer fucking chance - on the honest but one-in-a-million mistake of a Chinese-illiterate weirdo like Heero Yuy - is too much to be contained and he roars until his eyes water.

Heero shrugs, shaking his head in self-abasement.

“You thought I was a tutor?” Wufei says, delighted at the idea, because every angle it presents is a perfect farce. “You’re an idiot! You paid too much!”

“Should I ask for a refund?”

Wufei simmers down at once. “I’ll repay what I owe you, you have my word.”

“I don’t want your money,” Heero says, and then he catches the echo of the conversation in the car and adds, almost self-consciously. “I don’t need repaying - I want rid of the money so I may as well spend it doing something. Tutor me, and call it even.”

Wufei sits back. The offer is sensible though he hadn’t seen it coming, but the logistics seem impractical. “There are only 9 days. I … expect I shall need to leave sooner than that. The visa.”

“As much as possible before then,” Heero suggests. He doesn’t blink. “If you leave tomorrow, then I’ll take an afternoon of tuition today. I don’t care how. You need to go out and run errands, and I don’t mind doing that either. I prefer practical learning to memorising from a book.”

“I need to go out,” Wufei confirms. Sitting around all morning has made him restless. “And I’ll leave when I can, or if you want me to. I’ll go at any time. Just say the word.”

Heero slows eating and then frowns slightly.

“What would you do, if I kicked you out?”

“Find work. Though I don’t like working for other people either. In fact, I've never done it. But I’m doubtless capable of manual labour and I’m interested in travelling. I’ve never seen Earth except in pictures.”

“I think you’ll like it,” Heero says. “You’re the type.”

“The type?”

“You fit better when I imagine you in an open space,” Heero says. “Even if you’re having an attack of vertigo.”

Wufei’s mouth twists. “It was-”

“I know,” Heero cuts him off. “I was a spacer too. And it’s none of my business, but that isn’t a well-defined plan and I don’t think you’re the type of person to go through life aimlessly. What’s your goal?”

“My goal? If you’re asking if I’m involved in something bigger than me, then I’m not. But you’re right to say that up until now, my whole life was mapped out. So in terms of how I want to live, and where… I don’t know yet. My immediate goal is to remain on Earth and learn how to live here.”

“Sounds logical.”

“Thank you.”

“There’s another thing I want,” Heero says, eyeing him. “I want to fight you again.”

“Spar?”

“Yes. But more than that. I’d like to fight you,” Heero shakes his head. “I was holding back. So were you. It wasn’t satisfying in the least.”

Wufei folds his hands on the table and regards Heero carefully. “I have a request.”

“Go ahead.”

“I need to learn about living on Earth. Everything I know is from books, but it’s obvious now how biased they were. I never ask for help, but it would be stupid not to ask for advice. Give me the information I need, and I’ll help you in any way that I am capable.”

In his head, he already has a list. It makes him impatient to be moving. Heero regards him back, perfectly still, like someone has built him in place on the chair, a portrait of a person and not quite a real human as a result. And then Heero blinks and the impression vanishes.

“I agree,” he says, extending a hand.

His palm is warm and rough against Wufei’s, the grip tight, and the deal done.

____  
____

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter - the boys go out to run errands, Heero learns more about his guest than he does of Mandarin, and Wufei hits on a golden opportunity.


	10. Bartering

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Wufei starts putting his plans into action, Heero learns the rules of the game, and cannot decide if the opponent is friend, foe, or worthy romantic rival. Not that he's in a romance, of course.

**Chapter 9 - Bartering**

“I need an auction house.”

This is not what Heero is expecting to hear, and he pauses. “An auction house?”

“Yes,” Wufei says simply, not slacking his pace. They are heading out on foot, Wufei neatly stepping over the puddles and ignoring the drizzle. Heero offered him the umbrella, and when this was turned down, opted to follow Wufei’s example. 

Wufei stops at the next crossroads and turns to him. “Which would be better? The business district? Or is there an artisan’s quarter here?”

“I don’t know,” Heero says. 

“Then I’ll ask,” Wufei replies, and he strikes off again like a hound on a trail, full of purpose. He’s enjoying himself, Heero realises. Walking next to Wufei enjoying himself is like being around the controlled roar of a furnace. 

Heero frowns. “What are you selling?”

“It’s none of your business,” Wufei says, as a statement of fact. “You can’t help with this. I’ll require your advice afterwards,” he adds, “But this is personal.”

“I can go away and wait somewhere,” Heero offers, twisting past a slower group of pedestrians to keep apace. 

“To what purpose?” Wufei replies, annoyed at the suggestion. “I’d have to go chasing around trying to find you again.” 

Considering that it’s Heero who has their means of communication in his pocket, this seems a little unfair, but Heero’s curious enough to abide with the situation, and tag along. 

He steers Wufei towards the bustling centre of the town, and they trail up and down any number of streets, Wufei growing more focussed and more irked with each turn until they come up by chance at the foot of a familiar sign. Wufei stops dead and points at it. 

“The Ritz?”

“Probably a branch hotel.”

“I presume guests of some import?”

“I guess,” Heero says warily, and with increasing caution when Wufei rubs his hands together and looks darkly pleased.

“Good,” Wufei says. “Then they’ll be used to answering questions without asking any.” 

They tramp into the plush lobby, and Heero finds yet again the goalposts shifting in his appraisal of Wufei. The man has no evident materialism, but evidently he is neither impressed by ostentatious wealth nor disused to it. His body language changes, whereas Heero feels increasingly claustrophobic and resentful of this much Italian marble. 

Wufei’s tone with the concierge is polite and forthright with a touch of arrogance. To their left is a corporate suit, acting much the same. It’s only when Heero catches Wufei glancing sidelong whilst the concierge is checking something that he realises that Wufei is putting on an act. 

‘No,’ Heero thinks again, ‘Not an act. Adjusting himself.’ The arrogance is real enough, but a veneer to screen that more easily discomforted man frightened of the thunder. 

“I have directions,” Wufei announces as they step back into the street. “Please find this place.”

Heero looks it up. It’s in the next quarter and heading out of the business area of the city, but more easily walkable than anything. 

They head off, Wufei no longer straining ahead now, so that the walk is oddly companionable. The drizzle slacks off completely, allowing a hazy lemon-yellow sun to start burning through the clouds and the humidity to rise. They cut through the municipal park and both feel something unwind at the change in surroundings. 

“It’s not the same, incidentally,” Wufei says, breaking the silence. 

“What isn’t?”

“Mandarin. I have a different accent, and I’m not wholly familiar with the Earth variety.”

“It’s 4,000 years old. How different can it be?” Heero says, philosophically. “I need to communicate, not give speeches.”

Wufei nods, accepting this. Then he switches to Mandarin and says, “Lesson number one. At the shop, listen, and look. After we leave, tell me everything. Describe the people and the objects you see. Repeat the conversation you heard. Understand?”

“Understand,” Heero says, considering. It’s not a bad lesson, he has to agree. It plays to the demands of his line of work, and it’s a lesson they can squeeze in and around the day without being obvious about it. “How many languages do you speak?”

Wufei thinks about it. “Three? I can read more, to an extent.”

“Is that typical for L5?”

“Not really. Most people speak some English, or _kopi-_ English. Some of the lesser families use Wu as a home language, but everything formal functions in Mandarin or Japanese. Oh, the merchants have a bastard type of Japanese. They call it _chuuhon_.”

“L1 isn’t dissimilar. Mix of English, Japanese and Spanish.”    
   
“Quite the mix,” Wufei comments. 

They emerge into a district with smaller blocks and tree-lined streets, suggestive of money. Heero guides them to the address, which transpires to be the ground floor of a simple four storey building, designed to give the impression of gravitas. Heero notes the narrow windows atypical of a shop front, but pleasing from a security standpoint. You couldn’t ram them with a car. 

A grand car with black tinted windows is parked on the street, and as they park, Heero notes the driver is wearing a hat, but rather than a chauffeur's cap, it’s a bright red fez. 

The hell is the mandarin for ‘chauffeur’, he wonders.

A second man is at the door with the attitude of a bouncer, but he make no move to speak to them as they approach, other than to give them a lazy once over with his eye. There’s a gun tucked into a shoulder holster under his vest, and there’s something about him that reminds Heero of Duo. Even as he thinks this, the man gives them a lazy grin and a nod before pushing his sunglasses up his nose again. 

The shop is a quiet hum of activity; two girls in qipao are in the process of checking and wrapping a porcelain tea set. One has a brush and an eyeglass, whisking the bristles into the nooks, whilst the other deftly twists each clean piece in tissue paper. 

A man perhaps only 5 or 6 years older than them is at the counter, stacking a selection of parcels into a courier box.

“Yes, sirs?” he asks. 

“Are you the owner?” Wufei asks. 

“He’s with a guest. Can I help you?”

“I wanted something valued…”

“One moment please.”

The clerk closes the lid on the box, gesturing to the women. The tissue paper girl leaves her colleague and collects the box, toting it past Heero and Wufei to the door. 

The other girl goes on deftly brushing, eyes lowered. To the ticking of the wall of clocks, Heero composes a list of things he knows how to say in Mandarin, and a longer list of things that he does not. 

The clerk returns followed by a more likely owner of an antiques store. Nearing 60, dressed in an unremarkable three-piece suit softened by the choice in colour and the soft, squinting eyes behind thick lenses. 

“Gentlemen, welcome to our shop. Please,” he ushers them to an empty counter. Heero trails behind, watching the outside. The girl is still talking to the men by the car. The driver has emerged to pack the box into the backseat which is already filled with luggage or purchases, whilst the man at the door has taken to flirting. 

“I see,” the owner says, eyebrows raised in earnest interest. 

Heero begins to attend to the conversation in earnest himself, and is gratified to find that the old man’s slow tones aren’t as taxing to follow as his landlord’s. Heero also suspects that Wufei is deliberately simplifying things for him, but in any case, all Wufei says by means of an opening are, “Please look at this for me.” 

The antiques-dealer obligingly delivers a small tray lined with velvet to the counter. Behind them the girl re-enters the shop and resumes packing. The men at the car have drifted back to their original positions also, although the sly one keeps peeking in through the window. 

They can’t seriously consider that there’s any threat out there, Heero concludes. 

In front of him, Wufei lifts his hands to his collar and unbuttons it. His fingers slide around the pale nape of his neck, pulling into sight a thin silvery chain. The necklace is fastened by means of a bright green bead that casts a watery reflection on Wufei’s skin as he  pops it free of its hook and lifts the whole thing clear of his body. 

Heero leans to watch as Wufei slips a little bag free from the necklace and carefully lays out both on the tray. 

The antiques-dealer, both hands laid flat on the counter leans in to look, neither blinking nor breathing. 

“Ahh,” he says after a long pause. It’s the sound of a man on a hot day who has spotted a cold drink within arm’s length. “May I examine it?” 

“Please do.” 

A muscle in the back of Wufei’s jaw tenses a fraction as the antiques dealer gently lifts the pendant and holds it up to the light. The jade - Heero presumes it’s supposed to be jade - gleams, the light falling through it and revealing an almost artificial lack of imperfections. It’s so clear that even the antiques dealer makes a faint noise of doubt. He pulls across a great magnifying glass on a pendulous arm and repeats the test. 

It’s image doubled in size, suddenly Heero can make out watery striations within the stone. It reminds him of a painting he once saw. Pure black from a distance, but up close a hundred different shades. 

“Ahh,” says the dealer again, carefully replacing it. He repeats the examination with the little bag, which contains a pair of earrings. 

The dealer says something too poetic to translate, but Heero hears the reverence in his tone. He glances at Wufei again, who has turned stoic. As the owner lays the earrings down inside the circle of the necklace, Wufei palms the pink silk bag back into his possession. 

“I wish to sell these.” 

The owner bows. “I am honoured to assist.”

“Today?” Wufei presses, breaking the convention of the deal, it seems, because the dealer blinks hard and hesitates. 

“An object of this quality; it would be very difficult to achieve its true value in a short time. To court the best buyers… you have no preference?” He trails off, giving Wufei such a searching look that it makes Wufei pale. 

Heero spots the crease that forms in Wufei’s sleeve as his tightens his hand. Something crinkles as Wufei does so, out of sight. 

“This is my mother’s last behest,” Wufei says tightly. “There are reasons…” 

The girls have finished packing up the tea service and one now jangles out through the door to deliver it to the car - the brush girl, Heero notes -  whilst the other engages her time rearranging items on a shelf around the empty space the cups once stood. The distraction makes the dealer hesitate again. 

“Please wait here,” he says, and bowing, vanishes into the back of the shop. 

They are left with the silence and the jade.   

Wufei stands with his defences primed, his body language as good as out-turned needles, and Heero says nothing. Like Barton, like fishermen, he knows the value of patience. Instead, he asks, 

“What’s the Mandarin for ‘magnifying glass’?” 

 _“Fàngdàjìng_ ,” Wufei replies, and stops looking like he’s got a mouthful of glass. He drops his hands from his sleeves again, but the pink silk bag has vanished. 

The dealer returns some minutes later, bowing backwards out of his own quarters and then turning to start the process of bowing towards them. 

He murmurs when he speaks next, one hand held slightly to his mouth as if he doesn’t wish anyone outside to even lipread his words. Heero catches only the phrases ‘important guest’ and a lot of phrasal padding intended to make straightforward things more polite. Even Wufei seems uncertain, but he nods. 

The deal neatly shakes out a silk cloth over the jewellery, and lifts it, gesturing them to actually come behind the counter and they shuffle along, behind the neat little man bearing the tray. 

They pass out of the shop floor into a dim corridor, but then almost immediately step out into the daylight expanse of the most unexpected courtyard. 

The building extends above a patio by means of a glass overhang rippled with drying rain. A woman pops up as they emerge onto it, taking the velvet tray and placing it is a position of honour on a cabinet where all can see it. She bows and ushers them in amongst the chairs and divans. 

She is not alone. A young voice pipes up from the nearest couch and then a man rolls up to his feet and smiles in greeting. 

Wufei stops dead in his tracks. Heero, not expecting it, walks hard into the back of him, and then carried by his own impetus, has to step past him. 

The stranger rolls off a line of melodious Chinese, and then hangs there on his smile before their blank faces. “Hello,” he ventures in English instead. 

There is a silence that extends almost past the point of rudeness, before Heero realises that they are all waiting on him to say something. Caught out, he only nods. “We didn’t know what we were meant to expect,” Heero says, and the other man laughs. 

“Neither did I,” he says, holding out a hand. He has a firm grip, which his otherwise gentle body language did not betray. “Quatre Winner, pleased to meet you.”

“Heero Yuy.” He glances left to find that Wufei is inspecting the floor with ferocious intent, and as Heero’s eyes alight on him, Wufei’s ears start to redden. 

“This is Chang Wufei,” Heero supplies. The second handshake is as short as a handshake can be without becoming a high-five. Quatre tilts his head, bemused, but unoffended, and eases back to the couches. He must be the owner of the car and the employer of the Arabs, Heero thinks. What kind of person? Heero can’t decide. He’s young, like them, but that means nothing. A decade ago almost a whole generation were wiped out in the upheavals, Heero’s own parents amongst them. The world is full of the Young and the Old and not much in between. 

Quatre’s wealth is evident in his bearing; his clothes are not ostentatious but of good quality, and besides, he has an aura about him that screams ‘client’ to Heero’s security-minded radar. 

The woman, who must be the owner’s wife, kneels at the table with cups to supplement those already laid out, and small dishes to accompany the tea; pistachios in their shell, a confection of egg-washed pastry which might be sweet or might be meat, jujubes, sour plums and jerky. She serves it all, smiling and encouraging them to eat, eat, drink. 

Heero sits in one of the chairs, leaving Wufei to perch on the other divan. The flush has spread around the back of Wufei’s neck now like sunburn, and he seems enraged until Quatre says, “Have you traded with Mr. Hseng before?”. 

Wufei opens his mouth to reply, stumbles out a cough instead, and only after this manages to say, “No.” Then he glares at the pistachios. The wife, taking this as her cue, offers him the whole plate. Withering, Wufei accepts a pinch of them. 

“We’re both new to Chengshi,” Heero says, still observing Wufei, despite turning his gaze fully to Quatre. “You seem to know this place well.”

“Yes, because of the space port,” Quatre replies, “I have to pass through about once every year or more, and I like these more out of the way places on the north-west side. It’s less hectic.”

“You’re colonial?”

“L4,” Quatre confirms.  “Yourself?”

“We’ve both got connections,” Heero says, as a diplomatic lie. “L1 mainly.”

“How about that?” Quatre smiles again. It’s an unforced and genuine smile, as though that meagre connection to space between them is a reason for celebration. He leans forward, palms open. “Do you deal in antiques?”

“My friend does,” Heero says.

“Not normally. It’s a family piece,” Wufei corrects, fiddling with pistachios.

Quatre raises his eyebrows in interest. “Oh? What does your family do?”

“They passed away,” Wufei replies, and Quatre’s sunshine immediately fades behind a cloud.

“I’m so sorry to hear that. Please forgive my asking.”

“No, no, not recently.”

“Even so,” Quatre replies, with a softness that makes Heero think he’s not unfamiliar with loss himself.

Wufei clears his throat and drives into a change of topic. “I take it you patron this shop quite often?”

“Like I said, I pass through about once a year,” Quatre says, sipping tea. “And yes, to an extent. Mr. Hseng is a family friend. My family’s business is rather sprawling, and one of my sisters has taken to more professional auctioneering. I merely call in to pick up a few trinkets for my own use.”

Heero recalls the milky translucency of the china and decides that what Quatre calls ‘trinkets’ others would call ‘heirlooms’. He expects Wufei to pursue the line of inquiry, but he backs off into silence instead. The woman pours more tea and nudges the plates around again.

Heero turns over the facts and slots a few pieces together. “Winner, of the Winner Zaibatsu?” He asks, and Quatre’s smile turns self-conscious.

“I’m afraid so. Although please don’t take that to mean anything. I’m not terribly important with the organisation. I tend to just be rolled out as a representative to formal events.” He laughs, and for the first time it sounds a little false.

Heero lowers his cup. “You’re Zayeed Winner’s son?”

“Mm, though again, please don’t take that to mean anything.”

Across the table, Wufei pulls an almost comical face; a perfect understated communication of the word ‘yikes’.

“Really,” Quatre insists, palms glazing over the thighs of his suit. “Ah, there’s four of us,” he adds, perking with sudden interest. “I don’t suppose either of you play mahjong?”

“No,” Heero says, unclear what mahjong has to do with anything, at the same time as Wufei, with lifted eyebrows, says, “Yes.”

Quatre relays this to Mrs. Hseng with pleasure, and the woman presses her hands together in equal delight. She waves a hand at her husband and the conversation dallies off along a new branch.

“I’ve been promising Mrs. Hseng a rematch,” Quatre says, “but we’ve been unable to make up a forth because I always end up dropping in unannounced at awkward times. You’ve never played?”

“No,” Heero repeats, finding himself being determinedly but gently shifted aside as a second table is introduced to the space between the couches and stools rearranged.

“You may like it. It’s quite challenging,” Quatre enthuses. “I’ve been trying to convince the Maganacs to play with me, but they’re addicted to Backgammon to the exclusion of all else.”

The tiles are tipped out onto the baize, yellow as old bone. Or perhaps they are ivory. Heero watches as Wufei is hustled around to sit kitty-corner to Quatre on Heero’s side of the table, the Hsengs making up the other points of the compass.

Mrs. Hseng chatters, brought into a life of her own with the introduction of the game pieces. Her husband nibbles on jerky and the atmosphere changes subtly until Heero feels as though they’ve been absorbed into an evening with the family, rather than a private interview with a view to sale. The pendant remains under its cloth.

Discreetly, Heero checks his watch.

And then the table bustles. The tiles click and slide as they are shuffled with brusque movements. The players dip their hands in to pluck them out of the pile and line them up in a ritual of counting.

Wufei is murmuring under his breath in Mandarin. “There are 140 tiles, these, in three suits - families.”

Heero nods, absorbing the new words - suit, tile. Quatre lifts his head from counting and asks, “Are we playing bonus tiles?” Then he smiles. “Heero could keep score.”

“I can tell you what to write,” Wufei adds to that.

Heero accepts the pencil and paper, and watches as they finish setting up. Dice are rolled and it seems Mrs. Hseng is awarded the honour of breaking up all the tidy lines and shuffling, distributing 13 tiles to each player.

“What goal?” Heero asks, in Mandarin.

Wufei replies succinctly, “Win.”

But he tilts his hand towards Heero, and with his fingertips discretely indicates the key tiles. Being on Mrs. Hseng’s right, Wufei takes the first move and the game progresses apace.

It’s something like poker, Heero quickly realises. The aim being to make pairs, 3 or 4 of a kind or the equivalent of a straight with the various suits. Players take and discard tiles, and he see where the strategy comes into it. Wufei has a growing run of tiles which he hasn’t declared, and presumably the others are attempting to build a hand likewise. Heero observes the other faces. Wufei keeps his eyes lowered to the table, neat in his movements. Quatre is seemingly open-faced, but the column under his name is steadily filling with Heero’s scribbles the fastest. The Hsengs appear to be working as a team, but Mr Hseng appears to be counting tiles, and although the least obtrusive player, isn’t to be underestimated.

“Mahjong!” Mrs. Hseng announces abruptly, tipping over her hand and this concludes the round.

Wufei is in third.

He makes second when the game ends, a tiny step ahead of Mrs. Hseng, who evidently knows her husband too well for him to strategise against her. Quatre’s score is remarkable enough that Heero wonders if he’s miscalculated, but a wry look from Wufei confirms it.

“Why don’t you play a round?” Quatre suggests.

“You all want to play,” Heero says, meaning ‘no’, but Mrs. Hseng isn’t about to let him use them as an excuse. She hooks her husband around the table to the place beside her, Team Hseng, and fusses Heero into the empty space in a way that is impossible to refuse.

As Wufei deals, he catches Heero’s eye for a moment, and there’s challenge there.

‘Met,’ Heero thinks, and they play.

It’s an education not only on the rules of the game in practice, but also of the players.

Quatre plays as though listening to a secret music, head slightly tilted, making decisions with ease. Wufei is analytical, he watches the hands and the tiles, not the faces, but seems to read as much in it. The Hsengs are split and so makes a strong team - she reads the faces, he focuses solely on the numeracy of the tiles.

‘Savants,’ Heero thinks. No doubt that's the appeal. The young man opposite him is the perfect strategist, Mr. Hseng a strong mathematician. Quatre Winner must go through life itching for an equal.

Heero glances at Wufei’s hands, the blunt fingers moving delicately over the tiles as any piano player.

‘Rusty,’ Heero thinks.

Because Mahjong is a game for four players, and this busy, ageing couple have more associates to play with than anyone else sat at the table.

“Mahjong,” Wufei says, tipping the tiles.

“Ehhh?” Mr. Hseng says in surprise, and Quatre says, “Oh! My dragon...” His discard had affording Wufei the win.

“Thank you,” Wufei agrees, organising the tiles and actually smiles at having got one up on the game. A second later he lifts his eyes and shares the smile with Heero, a good-humoured look of satisfaction and mischief, though Heero is too caught out to smile back.

The clocks are chiming.

“Ah,” Wufei says, smile faltering.

Somehow the afternoon has slipped away. Quatre checks his own watch, as if he doesn’t trust the antiques.

“Bother,” he says, with feeling. “I suppose I shouldn’t stay out too much longer. They’re expecting me at dinner.”

He looks as though he’d rather break his own hand than attend dinner.

“We should go as well. We’ve intruded long enough.”

“It’s not an intrusion, not at all,” Quatre says, “I’ve very much enjoyed meeting you both. And show me the necklace, won’t you? Before you go?”

Mr. Hseng passes Wufei the cushion as Mrs. Hseng decants the mahjong pieces from the table. The green of the baize seems dull in contrast to the jade when Wufei lifts the cloth away.

“Oh, it’s lovely,” Quatre says, with understated admiration. “Who did it belong to?”

“My mother,” Wufei says, “I believe that the stone itself came from Xinjiang, but it was probably carved in Sichuan. It almost certainly predates the colony.”

“Then it’s quite the treasure,” Quatre says, lightly. “I don’t know anyone worthy of wearing it.”

“I’m sorry to have wasted your time,” Wufei says, moving to collect the pieces, but Quatre’s hand stays his movement.

“My sister has many museum contacts,” Quatre says, and Heero feels like he’s blinked and missed something - a connection that Quatre has seen and he has not. “This is rare quality, and I’m sure I know a place that would be honoured to take it.”

Wufei doesn’t appear to be especially honoured. He mutters gruff thanks, and Quatre catches Heero’s eye instead, with an expression of faint amusement.

The Hsengs are too discrete in their business to permit anything as gauche as haggling out loud over the price. Mr. Hseng instead provides Quatre with a pen and paper, and the blond writes for a minute or two with slow swoops of ink across the page. The ceremony of it all is drawn out by the fact that they have to wait for the ink to dry before Quatre can fold it and pass it with both hands to Mr. Hseng. The antiquarian takes it with a bow of the head, also in both hands, politely reviews the contents and then passes it to Wufei.

Wufei tilts the paper away from Heero as he reads the offer, and his expression is carefully void of either avarice or disappointment. He lifts the pen and, still excluding Heero from his thoughts, adds a brief sentence to the end of the paper.

This too is passed back via Mr. Hseng, and first a puzzled look crosses Quatre’s face, followed almost immediately by recognition and then something raw. “Agreed,” he says, aloud. “Please excuse me. I’ll have to make a call.”

Mr. Hseng peels a fresh sheet of paper and lays out his own neat print across it in sections, passing it once more to Wufei. This gives Wufei pause, but he fills out what is, as far as Heero can glimpse, his personal details. Name, ID number; all that jazz. He taps the nib twice against the sheet at the last heading and then scratches something out and quickly returns it.

Mr. Hseng reviews the information, and then, with no small amount of delicacy, returns it, his comments barely audible. Wufei sits for a moment, reviewing it, and then clears his throat. He leans towards Heero, voice similarly low and says, “I don’t have an account.”

Heero leans to check, and finds that where Mr. Hseng has indicated that information be provided, Wufei has written only his name.

Ah.

In the spirit of the old-world feel of the proceedings, Heero extracts his own bank card and folds it in the paper. This is accepted and Mr. Hseng rises to go and copy out an official receipt of sale; Heero expects with a tidy little broker’s fee for his convenience on top.

As such, the actual transfer of funds is done out of sight, as if money has a bad smell it would not be good manners to let waft in front of guests. The tray is taken, and when all parties return, Mrs. Hseng brings it back bearing Heero’s bank card on the one side and a brocade box on the other; the jewellery snug within it.

“Well, it’s been a pleasure,” Quatre says, once the respective items are in their respective owners hands. “Perhaps I’ll see you if I ever pass through again.”

“Are you returning to L4 today?” Heero asks, just out of curiosity. Something in the way Quatre said it.

“No, next week.” Quatre rises. “But I’m afraid my schedule is packed. I’m sorry, I never asked. What is it that you do?”

“Security. Communications and IT.”

“Oh, are you working the conference?”

“I had planned to.”

Quatre cocks his head slightly. “No luck with the delegates.”

“I’m sure I’ll find something.”

“Of course. Security concerns are high. Between ourselves, there’s a rumour certain parties are seeking to block the vote by any means.”

This is news to Heero, and a slap to his pride, which rears unexpectedly. He hadn’t realised how little he’d been paying attention to the atmosphere in Chengshi. “An attack?”

“I couldn’t say,” Quatre says. “I hope not. I think if the people want to lobby for independence, they should be allowed. Don’t you?”

Heero senses again the sharp violence of Quatre’s intellect behind those lucid eyes and soft mouth. “I couldn’t say,” he replies, hedging his bets, and the smile warms another degree.

“Until next time, then,” Quatre says. “Goodbye, Mr. Chang.”

Wufei turns from where he is speaking to Mrs. Hseng. Somehow whilst Quatre and Heero have been talking, he has obtained yet another piece of paper from the lady. Quatre doesn’t bow as he leaves, but instead lightly touches one hand to his brow in a deferential gesture, leaving all the bowing to the Hsengs, who see them off with many well-wishes, and an open invitation to play Mahjong.

Stepping out on to the vacant street, and the world feels somewhat surreal.

“Here,” Heero says, holding out the card. Wufei takes it, rubbing his thumb over the raised numbers.

“Won’t you need it?”

“No, I have my phone.”

Wufei takes this cryptic response without comment, turning the card over to read Heero’s signature.

“What do you want to do now you’re rich?” Heero asks. The trees along the avenue are riotous with sparrows. The noise distracts Wufei for a moment while he assesses what it is.

“Now?” he repeats, “I suppose…I still owe you a lesson. And my thanks. I’m not used to being reliant on anyone.”

“I couldn’t tell.”

“Oh, shut up,” Wufei turns on his heel and strides off down the street, though there’s a new bounce to his step so he can’t really be angry. Heero follows slowly on behind. Wufei says, over his shoulder, “I have some errands to run. I won’t force you, but if you can stand another hour of my company, there might be dinner at the end of it. My treat.”

“I could just access the account from my phone and treat myself.”

It’s the wrong tease; Heero can almost see the shield go up.

“I don’t mind,” he corrects, “We could go to the New Market. Do you want to try all the things you can’t eat in space?”

Wufei’s mouth lifts at the corner, and then sharpens to something electric. “Are you trying to make me eat something weird?”

Heero smirks back. “Yes.”

“Then I’ll eat anything you can name in Mandarin,” Wufei offers. “That should be safe enough. Now, begin from the start - what did you observe?”


End file.
